


Something Put You In My Way

by autoschediastic, Ponderosa (ponderosa121), TheCosmicMushroom



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Injury, Canon Character of Color, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Cover Art, Cunnilingus, F/M, Fan Soundtracks, First Time, Friends to Lovers, Gaslighting, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Mental Health Issues, Oral Sex, Post-Season/Series 01 Finale, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Prophetic Visions, Psychic Abilities, Psychological Manipulation, Slow Burn, Sub Malcolm Bright, Team Feels, Trust Issues, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:41:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 55,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27296563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autoschediastic/pseuds/autoschediastic, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderosa121/pseuds/Ponderosa, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheCosmicMushroom/pseuds/TheCosmicMushroom
Summary: Malcolm Bright has been plagued with nightmarish visions of the future since he was a boy. For years, his cocktail of medications held the premonitions at bay, but John Watkins' knife brought them screaming back. Still, the resurgence of his gift wasn't enough for him to prevent Endicott's death.Now, with his father ignoring him, his sister avoiding him, and visions of gruesome crime scenes threatening to drive him mad, Malcolm faces the question of how to solve a string of murders that haven't happened yet. Working the latest uncomfortably familiar case to hit the Major Crimes Division brings him and Dani closer than ever, but can he trust her with the truth when the concept of seeing into the future is even more far-fetched than having a serial killer for a father?[begins immediately after the final scene in the Season One finale]
Relationships: Malcolm Bright/Dani Powell
Comments: 90
Kudos: 61
Collections: Prodigal Son Big Bang 2020 - Final Posts





	1. Cover Art

**Author's Note:**

  * For [IllestRin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IllestRin/gifts), [HoneyMayBee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HoneyMayBee/gifts).



> The authors would like to thank BlueSoaring(autoschediastic) for her amazing copyedits that polished this fan novel (what?!) to a shine, HoneyMayBee and IllestRin for stepping in at the last hour to provide some amazing art, and Leif, stlouisphile, and RikkiWilde for an authenticity read on dialogue and passages in Chapter 15. We would also like to thank jameena and Ace for all their hard work in coordinating the PSon Big Bang and making it such a success.
> 
> In addition to the listed tags, any additional potentially triggering content has been warned for at the start of each chapter. If there is anything you feel we are missing, please let us know. As the fic is set post-finale, expect season one spoilers galore.
> 
> We hope you all enjoy the fic!

Art by HoneyMayBee. 


	2. There's Blood in the Water

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Related track: [Blood // Water by grandson](https://youtu.be/Sk-U8ruIQyA) (YouTube).

The knife is on the floor. Ainsley stands frozen, splatters of blood dotting her face. Malcolm watches as one fat drop dribbles down her forehead and into her eyebrow. The glint of raw panic in her eyes kicks him into motion, and he clears away the cobwebs of nightmarish déjà vu with a sharp shake of his head. _Get rid of her DNA, get her cleaned up, and get her out of here._

“We need to clean this up, and we need to do it now.”

If she understands his implication, she doesn’t show it, just brings her hands up and stares at the blood on them in disbelief. _It doesn’t matter,_ Malcolm tells himself as he bends down and snatches up the knife. He spins on his heel and takes off toward the kitchen, tearing his jacket from his shoulders and dropping it on the floor as he goes. The first thing to cross his mind is that Mother's going to kill them for the blood stains on her eighty-thousand dollar Isfahan rug. Hysterical laughter bubbles up his throat as he pulls the jug of bleach from under the sink.

He thought it would be him. He believed it so deeply that these last six months have felt like living a death sentence. The knife is impossibly heavy in his hand before he dumps it in the sink. _Get rid of her DNA, get her cleaned up, and get her out of here,_ he thinks again as he fills the basin. He’d just taken the fall for one murder, how much harm could one more do? It hurts to laugh. He shuts his mouth and focuses on his mantra. _Get rid of her DNA, get her cleaned up, get her out of here, and then… and_ then _what?_

If only he’d seen Endicott’s death more clearly. His visions had never been terribly coherent, and they’d only just returned thanks to Watkins. He stares down at his quivering left hand, where a permanent ache now lives at the juncture of his first metacarpal and trapezium. Who would have believed him, anyway? He couldn’t even convince those closest to him that the girl in the box was more than the product of a traumatized child’s mind. How could he convince them of all the other things he’s seen, things with evidence far less tangible than a box in the basement?

“Focus,” he breathes, plunging his hand into the pool of bleach. He tugs the sink stopper out of the drain and flicks the faucet on as hot as he can stand to touch, rinsing the knife and his hand until his skin turns red. For thoroughness, and to avoid any trace of chemical burn, he carefully soaps his hands, digs under his nails. He dries and polishes the metal with a paper towel before securing a firm grip on the handle and marching back into the sitting room.

Ainsley is mostly as he’d left her except for the shivers wracking her frame hard enough he’s surprised she’s still on her feet. Chin dropped toward her chest, her hair has fallen around her face, immaculate highlights a pale golden curtain obscuring her expression as she stares down at Endicott’s corpse. She doesn’t move even as he sets the knife on the coffee table, steps into her personal space, and takes hold of her arms.

“Ains, I need you to listen to me,” he murmurs urgently, angling himself into her field of view to catch her attention. When he gives her a gentle nudge, her shakes abruptly subside. She finally lifts her head, eyes cloudy, lips parted.

“Malcolm, what happened?”

“Don’t worry about that,” he says firmly. “I need you to take off your sweater, your pants, and your shoes, then step over to the edge of the carpet with me. Do you remember that outfit Mom wore to brunch a few weeks ago? When she kept complaining about the scones?”

“The blue one?”

“Yes, the blue one,” he says, ushering her away from the bloodstains soaking into the carpet. A deep line mars her forehead. He forces himself to stay focused on her no matter how strong the desire to whip his head around is, paranoia insisting they’ll be discovered at any moment; Endicott would have made sure their conversation wasn’t interrupted, at least for a while. “Come on, Ainsley, please. First, take off your shoes, like I am—just leave them there.”

Malcolm toes off his loafers, careful with where they stand as Ainsley steps out of her heels. Her shivers start up again as her sweater peels away from clammy skin. When she’s left standing in only her bra and underwear, Malcolm takes the bundle of clothes and tosses them towards his discarded coat to be dealt with later; none of them will be salvageable.

“There we go,” he murmurs, coaxing her from the parlor with a hand light on her elbow. “We’re going to go upstairs and clean you up now, okay? Just like that time you fell in the puddle when we played over at the Stevensons’. We’re going to wash your face and your hands, and then you’re going to borrow Mom’s blue outfit.”

Ainsley turns to look back, and Malcolm’s hand on her arm goes bruisingly tight. “Stop,” he says, then deliberately gentles his voice. “Keep your eyes on me, Ains. Everything’s going to be fine. Just trust me.”

Her immediate nod reminds him so painfully of their youth, the way she’d looked up to him before she realized how broken he was.

_No time for that now. Wallow in your own inadequacies later. Stay focused._

His steps determined, hers hesitant and uncertain, he leads her to the upstairs guest room and bath that sees the most, if still infrequent, use. He washes her hands as thoroughly—more thoroughly—than he had his own.

Each step already plotted in his mind, Malcolm sits her next on the edge of the tub. Her arm falls limp the instant he releases it, lax fingers landing in her lap. Curled over herself in nothing but her undergarments, she looks small in a way she seldom has since childhood. A pang of guilt cuts through the haze of anxiety swelling in his chest, so he swallows it all down and reaches over to run the bath.

He pulls a cloth from under the sink. Ainsley is looking at him, but she doesn’t see him. She’s thousands of miles away, and as horrible as it is to admit, he prefers her vacant stare to wasting time searching for something meaningful to say. Watching her tear into Endicott, hearing that wild shriek she’d loosed as she plunged the knife into his chest over and over, Malcolm hadn’t recognized her—he wasn’t sure he even wanted to. Imagining that vicious ugliness living in himself was so much easier than facing it in her.

He should have tried harder. He can live with Endicott’s blood on his hands; he doesn’t want to live with it on Ainsley’s. If only he’d known—paid more attention, sought more triggers, been less of a self-centered fuck-up—he could’ve had a chance to save her from this.

“We’re almost done,” he promises.

He wets the cloth and sponges blood from her face, then her arms. One particular pattern of cast-off on her left arm captures his attention, so familiar that he can remember admiring the shape of it in the sky; an inverse Cassiopeia on fear-whitened skin. _It should have been me,_ echoes endlessly in his head. If only he could wash away regret as easily as the blood.

“Lean back,” he mumbles, rationalizing that it’s easier to do what has to be done as long as she’s in a biddable haze, “brace yourself. Close your eyes.”

He gets to his feet to help guide her, taking down the detachable showerhead as he checks the temperature, shields her eyes with his palm, and rinses her hair. In the end, he has to wash it free of product clumped with blood before the water will run clear. Without her camera-ready hair, she looks even younger still, so unlike herself. _That’s it,_ he thinks, disgusted, _pile the guilt on. That’ll help keep her out of prison._

Aloud, he says, “There we go, all clean,” and hates himself for treating her like a child. He turns his mind instead to what’s still needed: the surfaces to wipe down, items to replace, details he knows not to overlook from experience on the other side of the line. “You need to shower when you get home, all right? I did my best, but—”

Like a satellite delay, it takes a moment for Ainsley to get the message. He hands her a towel for her hair, and when she simply looks at it, he awkwardly tries to dry it for her. Another delay, and then she suddenly pushes at his hands. “Malcolm, what—”

“Endicott is dead. I killed him,” he says, willing it to become fact. “You’re going to put on Mom’s blue outfit, go straight home, and shower. Don’t answer the door, if you can avoid it, or the phone until you hear from me again. If you have to talk to someone, make it about a story follow-up. Do you understand?”

“But—”

“Ains, please. I know you can do this. Tell me you understand. What are you going to do?”

The shock is fading, the blank look pushed aside by a dawning horror that exposes the whites of her eyes as she realizes his plan. Not all of it, or she’d never agree. But enough. “Put on the blue outfit, go home, and then t-take another shower.”

“And if someone asks you about this?”

She blinks, a bit of steel now in the blue of her eyes. “Say nothing.”

“And if they figure out you were here? Who killed Endicott?”

Her face crumples. He squeezes her shoulder and urges her to stand up, hoping the motion will keep her from slipping back into a fugue state.

“Ainsley, who killed Endicott?”

“... you did.”

* * *

Getting Ainsley out of the house via the underground tunnels with their ruined clothes and cleaning up contact points takes more time than Malcolm would have liked. Now, all that’s left is ensuring the blood spatter and footprints around the body are too chaotic to tell a proper story. Back in his shoes, he paces, tracking his prints over hers, the weight of the knife heavy in his hand.

It’s when he’s standing over Endicott’s body, staring down at it in a near mirror of the pose Ainsley had been in, that a disorienting flicker tickles at the edges of his mind, that building pressure that signals an oncoming horror. _Fuck. Not now._

_Blood on split skin, on carpet, on shaking hands. Smooth, blonde hair saturated by it. Metal gleaming in his hand—no, not his, who…?_

“It should have been me,” Malcolm cries, clutching at the sides of his head, the cold press of steel against his ear a cruel reminder of the murder weapon in his hand. The room churns nauseatingly, and between blinks, the warm glow of the sitting room lamps fades, replaced by deep blackness stained by a swatch of moonlight. The body at his feet, gnarled in death, swims in his vision, smears of color and shadow warped by cool, gray light and the adrenaline in his veins.

When it vanishes and Endicott’s sightless eyes stare up at him again, his knees buckle beneath the crushing weight of failure. He gathers it up, looses it in a mournful howl as he drops to the floor beside the dead man and brings the knife slamming down. It slips neatly into the fourth intercostal space, slicing through fat and muscle with a sickening squelch. His stomach turns, but he can’t afford to hesitate; Edrisa will see if he does. As he yanks the blade free, sour-smelling fluid and blood reeking of warm metal spatter into his face and briefly overwhelms the stench of death.

 _Not enough,_ he thinks, frantically bringing the knife down again and again and again, until his arms tremble with fatigue and the blood seeping out of Endicott has spread across the floor, soaking into his trousers at the knee. A drop of sweat beads on his upper lip as he tries to catch his breath, and he licks it away without thinking. He gags at the taste flooding his mouth, the burn of bile almost welcome to scorch away the sensation of something small and squishy on his tongue.

He flings the knife away as if it’s to blame. It clatters to a stop against the baseboards on the opposite side of the parlor. On shaky legs, he wipes his hands off on his pants, scrubbing hard before digging his phone out. He freezes at the sight of red trapped in the whorls of his fingertips, then forces his fingers to move only to stop short again. Helpless, he stares at the number glowing accusingly on the screen. The promise of refuge he’s taken for granted for so many years now is gone. Gil isn’t going to pick up.

Malcolm closes his eyes and forces the knotted lump in his throat down. It lodges behind his breastbone, unforgiving of the apology he whispers to Dani as he puts the phone to his ear. The memory of her hand under his, their hesitantly shared and silent hope, eases a bit of the fear. He grasps at the memory, holding it desperately close and forcing his gaze to Endicott’s body while the phone rings and rings. Later, when they show him the crime scene photos, he can’t afford to react with anything other than what they expect.

Lost in thought and considering how he might profile the distressing number of stab wounds causing Endicott’s chest cavity to collapse in on itself, Dani’s voice is as sudden and surprising as a gunshot.

“You need to come to the house,” Malcolm tells her. “My mother’s house.”

“Bright, what the hell is going on?”

Malcolm traces the punctures and blood patterns. He’s done a serviceable job. The angle of the slice along Endicott’s throat will be impossible to determine, so while some stab wounds will be ruled as post-mortem, the sequence of events should remain opaque. As he turns to survey the room one last time before he commits completely and irrevocably, he spots one more opportunity to exploit.

“Endicott is dead. You need to arrange for evidence collection,” he says, crossing to the knife. It’s too easy to stare at his own chest and calculate where to cut, how deeply the knife needs to go. “And call an ambulance because I’ve been stabbed.”

He hangs up on the start of her rapid-fire questions—she’s a good detective, she’ll move fast. He bounces on the tips of his toes, eyes jumping from contact point to contact point the same as he would at a crime scene, only the version of this one he needs everyone to see doesn’t exist yet. With one more bounce, he launches into action, knocking an end table over with his hip hard enough to bruise, turning to catch himself on his hand and send it skidding through the blood and smear the couch red as if someone’s grappling with him from behind. His elbow sings when he swings the blade at the bookshelf, ensuring the wood nicks, then throws his back into it twice to make his ribs scream. It takes too long to steady his breath and his hand; the slashes across his chest, the underside of his arm, his palm, have to look like they were made quickly, decisively. It all tells a story, and he can only hope it’s the right one.

His focus thins. The pain takes a moment longer than the blood to manifest, the latter slow like the receding tide, the former crashing like a wave. It’s not so bad. Shock, hopefully, or an automatic defense to override inaction in the face of fear. He isn’t done yet, not without one last ace in the hole to sell the lie.

Mind and body are strange that way, Malcolm thinks as he braces the knife on a shelf, fight or flight triggered regardless of the fact that he can’t defend against or run from himself. Life might be infinitely less complicated if he could. He checks the angle over his shoulder and deems he’s as ready as he’ll ever be.

“Remember to breathe,” he warns and throws himself back.

He’d expected something like his souvenir from John Watkins: a sudden, sharp pang, the indescribable sensation of blood gushing out of his body at an alarming rate, the cold wave that numbed everything, freezing even the marrow in his bones. As the knife pierces his back, however, steel carving cleanly through the skin and fascia and muscle like a tender cut of chateaubriand, nothing turns to ice. It all just disappears.

_Walls painted a dull gray or washed out by bad lighting. A faceless blonde, her silhouette soft and undefined yet clearly fearful. She darts towards him, knife glinting wickedly in her hands—_

—not in her hands, in his back. He stumbles, confused, and grasps the handle to wrench it free before sense can intervene. The agony is instant, unrelenting. His mouth falls wide on a silent scream, tears already flooding his vision as his eyes squeeze shut, and they soak his face, or maybe that’s sweat, or—

 _—fresh blood on steel, too much to be real. It drips onto the floor with the sound of a pleasant spring shower. Her hand shakes, her glittering manicure stained wicked red._ It isn’t me, _Malcolm thinks, the only thought in his head as she slowly backs away, her loose-flowing clothes ruffled by an unfelt breeze._ It should be me.

Malcolm’s eyes snap open. The ornate tray ceiling glows golden in the lamplight, banishing the last remnants of the vision. He hasn’t had one this clear since Martin was arrested, not even the one that predicted Endicott’s blood on his hands.

“I already know this,” he says, the words made choppy by his labored breaths. “It doesn’t help me now! Why do this to me? Why—”

_The lights are out. What little he can see of the dead man’s face is unfamiliar, as is the sound booth. A broadcasting studio, and he stands in the master control area. Above the broad window, the “On Air” sign is unlit. Just beneath it sits a plaque, cast in shadow, the engraving a blur of lines. He runs his fingers over it lovingly. He squints to make sense of the letters, as if he has any control of what the vision shows him, but if he tries as hard as he can, maybe this time—_

His skin is tingling oddly. A chill creeps up over his arms, down his legs in the steady, inexorable march of an encroaching ice shelf. Black eats away at the edges of his sight and he blinks to clear it, each one slower than the last until his eyelids fall shut and refuse to open again. He bites viciously at the inside of his cheek, struggling against the undertow in vain. Before he succumbs to unconsciousness, he manages one last, deeply heartfelt sentiment.

“Shit.”


	3. Fear of My Own Dark Miseries

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Related track: [Littlest Things by Twin Shadow](https://youtu.be/K8NknCq_UO0) (YouTube).

A paper cup drops out of the ancient vending machine with a hollow rattle. Dani crosses her arms, fighting a yawn while she waits for the internal chugging to grind to a stop and spit out subpar coffee for her lasting pleasure. If she’s lucky, it’ll taste like dirt and water. If she’s unlucky, she’ll be back soon for a second dose to stay awake through what looks to be a long night. She doesn’t want to even consider needing a third.

They’d stitched up and processed Bright, and insisting he remain here in the hospital overnight for observation instead of in a holding cell was the best she could do. If the chain of command weren’t in question, it might not have worked at all.

She glances down the hall to where he’s cuffed to a bed with a uniform at his door, Gil touch-and-go only a few corridors away.

_What the fuck happened in that house?_

The coffee is black as ink and only slightly less appetizing. A mountain of sugar and enough cream to turn it the color of muddy sand makes it as close to drinkable as it’s going to get. The lid doesn’t fit right, so she holds it in place on the way back to Bright’s room.

In more ways than she appreciates, they’re right back where they started when this shitshow of a day started. He’s a suspect, and she—well, she ought to figure out what went down, but she’s just so goddamn tired, weighed down with the same pervasive, aching weariness as when her old man died.

She takes a seat in the corner, the vinyl visitor’s chair squeaking as she crosses her legs. Pointedly ignoring the questioning gaze aimed her way, grateful that at least the coffee is hot in her chilled hands. Between Malcolm and the coffee, she’s not sure which to face first.

He wins by virtue of being the least likely to cause second degree burns. She sighs and looks up.

Bright jumps at the opening. “Are you ever going to ask me if I killed Endicott?”

“Nope.”

His brow furrows. For someone barely into their thirties, he has more than his fair share of worry lines. Then again, so does she. “You think I did it?”

With Gil injured and all the potential conflicts of interest, her time on this case is limited. Chances are it’ll land on a desk outside Major Crimes before Malcolm’s discharged. She already logged a request for the crime scene photos, but she doesn’t like Bright for this anymore than she’d liked him for Eddie. Maybe if she’d listened to her gut, they’d have gotten to Endicott sooner.

“Do yourself a favor, Bright, and stop talking.”

“Oh, I’d love to,” he says, “but remember that whole ‘worst movie theater’ thing?” The cuffs rattle as he points a finger at himself.

She couldn’t forget it if she tried, honestly thought it impossible for something so raw and so real to come out of Bright’s mouth, and she had no idea what to do with it when it did. She sips her coffee and again falls back on the tried and true. Eyebrow cocking, she says, “You consider this situation what, too calm?”

“I could just use some kind of distraction.”

“TV remote’s right there.”

She doesn’t want to be so dismissive. Mostly it’s from habit. Too much of it is the knowledge that, even if her gut is right, with no solid evidence that Bright _didn’t_ kill Endicott, there isn’t a lot to keep him from taking the fall for two bodies. Hell, it could be three, depending on what the security footage from the lawyer’s office shows. She just can’t see a way out of this mess, and distance is the only way she knows how to deal with it.

Finally, Bright’s focus turns from her to the ceiling, and though she wouldn’t put it past him, that’s obviously not where his attention’s gone. His energy drains away to leave his body limp, hollowed out and unnaturally still. The sight makes her skin crawl. “How’s Gil? Any change?”

“Nothing yet.”

His jaw clenches. A sudden shadow at the door and the shriek of a chair skidding across vinyl interrupts the follow-up question she’s sure he had. Dani frees her hands of the coffee and shifts, clearing a path to her weapon. The guard’s voice is low and firm, and in direct contrast to how quickly he moved.

“Do you mean to say,” Jessica Whitly’s voice rises above the guard’s, “that my _son,”_ louder again, close to drowning out the steady beat of the monitor hooked up to Malcolm, “has been transferred to this floor, and no one thought to _inform me?”_ and she hits the peak of rage-induced distress, only attainable by mothers and small children. Dani catches Bright’s wince out of the corner of her eye as she launches herself straight out of the chair and through the door. The last thing she needs today is to arrest another Whitly.

“Ma’am, he’s technically in custody,” the uniform replies in what would be a soothing tone if it were anyone but Malcolm’s mother he’s talking to.

“I don’t give a damn about your technicalities!” Jessica snaps, then rounds on Dani. “You! Tell this man I have to see my son.”

It hadn’t taken Dani long to learn that the best way to deal with Bright’s mother was to choose her battles wisely. “It’s fine,” she tells the guard. “I’ll wait out here.”

“And what about my daughter?” Jessica insists, barely mollified. “I wouldn’t have any idea where he is if not for her. That is her brother, and she came all this way—” She turns as if she expects Ainsley to be right on her heels, and instead finds her daughter hovering nearly halfway up the hall.

Dani immediately pins Bright’s sister with an appraising look. Ainsley won’t meet her eyes, which Dani wouldn’t think possible for someone who shares so many similarities with Jessica, and her clothes aren’t the same as the ones she’d been wearing earlier. Her body language is full of red flags: hunched shoulders, restless feet, knees bent as if she’s ready to make a break for it. Even her hands, usually so certain and expressive, clutch at each other, knuckles white. She’s on guard and radiating with nerves and fear.

Why _wouldn’t_ Ainsley be nervous? A sociopath had stabbed her brother in the same house where a serial killer had tried to take out their whole family. Sometimes, Dani really hates where this job takes her thoughts.

“I’ll keep her company,” Dani says, more gently than she might have otherwise. She lays an apologetic hand on Jessica’s arm, and when Jessica offers a faint smile of gratitude in return, she knows she’s not the only one utterly exhausted. “It’s better if he doesn’t have too many visitors.”

Jessica accepts the implications gracefully. She sweeps through the door the officer holds open, her dramatic wail of, “Oh, Malcolm, _look_ at you,” perfectly timed to fill the hallway before it closes.

Dani and Ainsley share a look before reality reasserts itself and forces Ainsley’s gaze to the floor.

“Hey,” Dani tries, sidling closer. “He’s gonna be okay.”

“Are you sure? They wouldn’t even tell me what happened when they called.” Her hands twist together so tightly her skin mottles. She looks everywhere but at Dani and the door. “Just that he’d been stabbed.”

“Someone called?” Dani asks reflexively. “Who?”

“The—I’m Malcolm’s emergency contact.” Ainsley inhales deeply through her nose, releases it slowly through trembling lips. She’s seen Bright do the same plenty of times, usually when things get tense with Dr. Whitly—which one of them taught it to the other, she wonders.

If they share anxiety and the method of dealing with it, though, Ainsley bounces back far more quickly. She straightens her back and shakes her hair over her shoulder, and the resemblance to Bright vanishes—in this moment, she’s Jessica Whitly’s daughter. Poise restored, she looks Dani square in the eye with a reporter’s tenacity. “How did it happen?”

The sudden transformation throws Dani off for a split-second before the cop kicks in. “We don’t have that information.”

“When can we take him home?”

“Your brother is a suspect in two murders,” Dani says, softening with regret as the reporter in Ainsley falters. “You know what that means as much as I do. He does, too.”

“You still think he killed that man?” she demands.

“Without evidence to the contrary—” Dani winces. That’s something she can tell the sister, not the reporter, and with Ainsley vacillating between one and the other on a dime, she’d be better off packing down her concern for Malcolm. He might appreciate some consideration given to his family, but he’d appreciate her not fucking up his case more.

It won’t help anyone, reliving the blind fear that turned her legs to water and her stomach in on itself when she’d found Bright collapsed beside Endicott’s mutilated corpse. Neither is dwelling on the world-erasing relief she felt when her fingers found a pulse and he sucked in a rattling breath, recognition lighting up his eyes.

Her wrist where he’d clutched at her still aches. Weak at first, his grip turned punishingly hard, desperate. Soothing words had died on her lips when he’d gasped out with a terrifying clarity, “I did it. He tried to kill me, I had to.”

She hadn’t heard a word Malcolm said, and now, she’s not sure if he even spoke at all. Her focus, if anybody asks, was on securing aid for the apparent victim of a stabbing.

“Tell your mom to book a hotel,” Dani says, knowing it’ll come better from Ainsley than her. “Her living room is a crime scene.” She holds up a hand before Ainsley can speak. “I know there’s more than one. But she doesn’t need to see it, so a hotel will be just easier on her.”

“Two murders,” Ainsley repeats, her tenacity as a journalist giving her focus, “and my mother’s house is a crime scene again. Nicholas Endicott... found dead. You’re convinced Malcolm is responsible.”

“I didn’t say that,” Dani snaps and shuts her mouth with a sharp click of teeth. She’s _not_ too close to this. “The investigation is ongoing.”

A calculating gleam shows in Ainsley’s eye before she gets control of it and her lips thin. She whirls around, stalking to the elevators with her phone already in hand. Dani watches her go.

 _Maybe Bright and I aren’t so different,_ she thinks. Seems she can’t turn it off any more than he can, and her bedside manner leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. She shakes her head and goes to get a fresh coffee from the machine, not sure how long she’ll be out here but certain that however long it is, she’s going to need more caffeine.

Foregoing the chair, she takes up a post beside Malcolm’s door. The coffee’s even hotter this time, and the window frame digs into her shoulder. There’s something grounding about the discomfort. She glances once through the glass, the shades partially drawn, and looks quickly away from the sight of tears. If she wanted to work this case properly, she shouldn’t hesitate to snoop. Suspects say interesting things to family, especially when the conversation is as volatile as the Whitlys’ tend to be.

At least she knows where she stands

Eventually, the room grows quiet, long stretches of silence between a few words here and there. Dani can’t help the urge to check that they’re both still in there. She’s struck again by the exhaustion etched onto Bright’s face, his too-pale skin and the dark trenches dug under his eyes. She turns away at the distinct clack of heels approaching.

“—a good lawyer, Malcolm,” Jessica says, yanking the door open. Her expression doesn’t quite match the confidence in her voice. It morphs into a tight smirk as she spots Dani. “You’ll be out of here before the orderlies start their morning rounds.”

She’s good, probably from all the years of experience dealing with her ex-husband’s legacy, but Dani’s trained to catch the smallest of cracks in a person’s armor. Jessica Whitly’s not afraid; she’s terrified.

And Dani’s right there with her, too familiar now with a matching fear and the tangle of emotions caged behind her ribs.

Chin held high, Jessica marches to the elevators in Ainsley’s footsteps. Her defiance doesn’t waver for a second as the doors slide shut.

The uniform draws Dani’s attention with a cough. He’s wide-eyed and doing his best to hide it with a good-natured grin. “Family’s got more than a few screws loose,” he says and waits for her to chime in.

Instead of biting the poor bastard’s head off in a fit of protectiveness, she tosses off a lackluster smile as she turns to the window again. Whatever they’d given Bright seems to have finally done its job, his eyelids hanging heavily as he fights the inevitable drag of sleep. A part of her wants to head back in, to take up vigil in the corner of his room and make sure he can’t get himself into any more trouble, but her presence would only encourage him. With a sigh, she says, “I’m going to head off for a bit. You good?”

With a snort, he flops back into the chair beside the door. “Yeah, I can manage. You should get some sleep, Detective Powell. It’s been a hell of a day.”

 _You’re telling me,_ Dani thinks and beats it up the hall. She’s never much liked hospitals. The weeks she spent in this very same one watching her father wither away to nothing had done nothing to change her opinion. It’s more than the antiseptic smell that can never wholly cover the pall of sickness, more than the too-careful quiet. There’s something else in the air that feels like layer after layer of grime stuck to her skin, a suffocating weight that clings for days and leaves her scrubbed red after every shower until it fades. She dreads it’ll be weeks this time before it does.

Given the hour, only a single nurse performing rounds occupies the hallway. The faint chime of monitors and machines is distant, heard only through the cracks in the doorframes as the nurse goes steadily from room to room. Despite the bulletin boards bustling with visitor information, how to donate, volunteer opportunities, and health reminders, it’s as sterile and cold as the morgue. There’s no small relief in finally leaving the hall and shutting the door on it.

Enveloped in warmth and comfortingly familiar smells, Dani’s shoulders loosen. Beside the bed, chin dropped on this chest, JT snores loudly. It gives her something to smile about. Her partner isn’t the most expressive when things get real so his presence speaks volumes. She considers waking him. She’s not the only one affected so deeply by this case and it might help to share the burden, but if her schedule is any indication, he needs the sleep right now more than he needs her company. Grabbing the chair from the corner, she drags it closer to the bed and plops down in it backwards, her arms folded over the backrest.

Gil looks a hell of a lot more peaceful than his boy down the hall. The lines on his face have smoothed out over the last few hours and a good deal of his color is back. Knowing where he was and what condition he was in was painful enough; she hated coming here to see him struggling to breathe even with a ventilator. Unable to do a damn thing but wait had been hell. They’ve got some waiting to do yet, and while she still doesn’t like the look of the tubes taped to his face, trailing from his arm and running out from beneath the blankets, she can handle it.

She sighs. “I don’t know what to do, boss,” she whispers, resting her chin on her forearms. “Bright’s your specialty.”

Going in circles is the best she’s going to get out of staying stuck in her own head. She’ll get more out of talking through it, and it doesn’t matter that Gil won’t hear a word she says. His presence is enough. “You always told me to use the facts and trust my instincts, and right now my instincts are screaming at me that he isn’t good for a single body dropped. I just can’t prove it.”

Tired, she tips her head, cheek crushing the worn leather of her jacket as her focus slips back to JT. “He doesn’t like Bright for this, either. He won’t say it, but you know JT.”

The job had seemed so straightforward before Bright sashayed into the station. Major Crimes was respected, maintained a notable closure rate, and the team fit well enough together that she didn’t need to fight her way to some recognition. Somehow, even with soliciting advice from a serial killer and the chaos that inevitably followed, it got better.

It seemed from the get-go that JT wouldn’t in a million years warm up to their new pet consultant. Then, about a month ago, he let slip over drinks how he saw the Berkhead case as a defining moment for their team. Now, there was a Before Bright and an After Bright. It rang true, but what she didn’t tell JT was that the shift for her came at Christmas, when she was so afraid of losing Bright that she hadn’t even spared a thought for anything else. For her, it’s Before John Watkins and After John Watkins.

She slides her gaze back to Gil. “Bright’s not going down,” she promises, and it’s probably just a trick of the light or her mind, but he seems even more relaxed. She’ll take whatever she can get.


	4. Wake Me, I'm Dreaming

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Related track: [Waking by Future Islands](https://youtu.be/JspLkGzePNE) (YouTube).

Whole realities can change in the span of a few weeks. Especially when it’s Jessica Whitly with a mind to ensure that justice isn’t served.

Considering that he’s a free man when he’d expected cell bars, scratchy blankets, and an audience for every trip to the toilet, Malcolm isn’t exactly complaining. Ainsley, if she even knows how Mother pulled it off, won’t talk about it. Mother deals with it in exactly the same way she’d dealt with the Surgeon’s legacy: constant subject changes and enough blatant distress that Malcolm’s forced to drop it.

He’ll figure out how she’d managed it, eventually. There are few people she could access with enough pull in the Mayor’s office or influence with the Chief of Police to sweep the whole thing under the rug _and_ force an investigation into evidence tampering. By all accounts, the focus is on his case and not the hundreds of frame jobs manufactured by the lab on Endicott’s payroll.

JT nods as the town car pulls up and deposits Malcolm on the curb. “Welcome back.”

“It’s good to be back,” Malcolm replies, tugging his cuffs into place. The block seems quiet, typical even, a skyline of tall buildings with stores and services below, homes and unofficial offices above. He swings his gaze back to JT and tries, “Jonah.”

JT flat out ignores the guess at his name. He heads for a converted townhouse, pulling his sunglasses off at the door. “Body’s upstairs.”

The large foyer boasts a wall of labeled mailboxes, a notice board for residents, and a flourishing potted palm. A good deal of the original woodwork remains, if not as well cared for as the plant. JT bypasses the main stairwell in favor of a side door marked _Emergency_ and takes the narrow steps of an old servants’ passage two at a time up to the second floor.

The small landing leads to an equally tiny hall, the door propped open with a stop and the walls decorated with framed issues of _Rolling Stone_ strategically book-ended by articles and news clippings. Around the corner it opens up to an area that’s part-living space, part-office. More music memorabilia and evidence markers are liberally spread throughout the room.

Malcolm takes a moment to summon up everything he can recall of the vision in the recording studio. He steels his nerve, braced to keep even the smallest sign of recognition off his face as JT leads him to—

—a modest bedroom. A large, gray area rug in a geometric pattern, a double bed, a scattering of other furniture, and the various bits and bobs that accumulate in a well-used space. On the far side of the bed, close to the wall, Edrisa is bent over the victim. He blinks, mentally and physically stepping back. Nothing looks right until his attention hooks on the body—wedged into the corner, propped up by the radiator—and that nags at him until he forcefully moves on. He’s so distracted by the disconnect between what he expects and what’s in front of him, he doesn’t notice the other person in the room until he’s looking right at him.

“Gil!” He’s so glad to see Gil back in the field he’s suddenly torn. The lieutenant’s been sorely missed, of course, but something about the body is unsettling.

“Hey, kid.” On the surface, Gil looks like he’s bounced back. There are a few subtle notes of strain in his voice, and his casual elbow propped on the built-in bookshelf is there for support. Out of all of them, though, Malcolm’s the last one with grounds to suggest he stick to desk work for a little while longer. “Anything you can tell us?”

“Anything _you_ can tell _me?”_ Malcolm counters, grateful that Gil understands how his mind works. He skirts around the bed to join Edrisa, wanting to get back to it as much as he doesn’t want to keep Gil standing around.

“Well, the body’s been here less than twelve hours based on rigor, and the periorbital and mastoid ecchymosis means cause of death is most likely a basal skull fracture,” Edrisa fires off, popping up and grinning widely. She goes to tuck back a loose strand of hair and wrinkles her nose as she catches sight of her streaked and stained gloves. Chuckling awkwardly, she instead clasps her hands together with a squelch. A pause, then with a brilliant smile, she pretends nothing happened. “I’m so glad you’re back, Bright!”

Amusement tugs at Malcolm’s lips. “Good to see you, too, Edrisa. Do we have an ID?”

“Lindsay Harris, twenty-six,” Gil cuts in, clenching his jaw briefly in discomfort as he shifts his weight. “Freelance journalist, focused primarily on Broadway and the local indie scene, and herself a musician. In a band with four others, JT’s got their names. Fairly well-known through her work so they booked plenty of gigs, but nothing outside the local sphere.”

Malcolm crouches to get a better look at the bruising behind one ear. “Any sign of a stalker, maybe an overzealous fan?”

“Nothing obvious.”

The change in light does it. Her fingernails glitter in the sun streaming through the window. Blond hair matted with blood, white clothes loose and flowing and stained red from the head wound. Minimal cast off.

But he distinctly remembers a soundproofed studio and the gleam of metal. He’s sure there was more blood than this in his vision. “Did you find a knife? Was she moved?”

“Not that I’m aware, no,” Edrisa says, understandably confused with no traces of an edged weapon on the body. She helpfully holds the victim’s hair back to give him a closer look at the bruising. “Her limbs were definitely arranged post-mortem, but it’s unclear if the killer placed her in the corner or if she hid there herself after the head trauma. You’ve noticed it, too—the pattern there. It’s not the primary impact point that fractured her skull, but she was definitely struck with something.”

The knife and the blood—Ainsley. Could he have mixed the recent past with the near future?

He motions for Edrisa to turn the victim’s head. She looks nothing like his sister aside from being slim and blond, and there it is, blood dried on her split lip, speckles of it on her chin and the carpet. It’s not the first time he’s misinterpreted a vision. They give him so little to go on, his understanding of them changes constantly as additional information comes to light, but he’s never confused one so badly as to overlay it with what he’s experiencing when it strikes.

So, no knife, no sound studio. Blood, but then there’s almost always some measure of blood at every scene. Murder is never as tidy as some might hope. Subtracting the elements that came from him instead of the vision, he’s left with a connection to the music industry, minor signs of struggle, and a bruising pattern he’s definitely seen before.

“Shit,” Malcolm breathes, straightening as his memory resurrects past victims. “She had a pair of forge tongs clamped to her neck. Her killer used it to steer her in here like an animal before driving a cross-peen hammer into the back of her skull.”

“Laurence Chase Clark,” Gil says, immediately connecting the dots. “Altoona, you were on the case for the arrest. Multiple life sentences.”

“My first serial case. This has too many similarities to be anything but a copycat,” he says and indicates the bed. “He definitely placed the body. It’d be difficult to get her where the killer wanted without restraints, and there are no signs of those. Look at the way he stacked the pillows. Just like Clark’s first victim, the body is poised to watch, and he settles down while he….” Malcolm lets his eyebrows creep up into his hairline. “You know.”

“Let’s check for fluids,” Gil says, grimacing as he turns to leave.

Flashing a quick smile at Edrisa, who’s already digging out a swab kit, Malcolm hustles up to offer a shoulder to lean on.

While Gil’s never been one to stroll along when there’s work to be done, there’s a determination in his stride that someone less charitable might call mulish. “I’m fine.”

Malcolm slips in front, walking backwards through the hall and eyeing Gil skeptically. “There’s something you’re always telling me. What was it?” At the top of the stairs, he stops to tap his chin thoughtfully. “It’s right on the tip of my tongue. Take… no, wait. Was it call…” he chews his lip as if struggling to remember. “Call for—”

“Can it, kid,” Gil says, and Malcolm’s never been so satisfied to be told to shut up. “We have bigger problems. You’re fresh off the hook, and suddenly there’s another murder connected to you, however loosely.”

“It’s some coincidence,” Malcolm agrees. The dozen theories of varying levels of probability tumbling around in his head have an unfortunate commonality. Since Dr. Whitly’s return to the creature comforts of Claremont, Malcolm’s phone has been a weight of unanswered messages in his pocket.

_Malcolm, it’s Dad. How’s your sister?_

_Malcolm, haven’t heard from you in a while. Hope you’re readjusting to life on the outside—that’s a joke, I’m glad you’ve been released. Call me if you want to compare notes._

_Malcolm, Dad again. Saw your sister on the news. Are you back at work yet, my boy?_

He tried not to think much of it when the messages slowed, chalking it up maybe a little too hopefully to a strategy change in Martin’s ongoing campaign for attention. In light of today’s events, he’s forced to consider the possibility of more extreme measures, such as his father’s phone time used to connect with old acquaintances in a position to leave a more visceral message. One Malcolm wouldn’t be able to ignore.

“Looks like you’ve got something already,” Gil says.

“A few ideas on connections, motives. Not much yet.” Heading down, Malcolm glances over his shoulder every other step to monitor Gil’s progress and notes the hand pressed firmly to his abdomen isn’t nearly as steady as the one on the rail. “Do you need me at the station?”

Well aware of Malcolm’s scrutiny, Gil shakes his head. “We’ll call as soon as Edrisa has something for us. JT’s going to finish up here.” Using it as an excuse to rest, he pauses halfway down and calls out, “Isn’t that right, JT?”

“Yeah, boss,” JT bellows, “wrapping it up,” almost drowning out Edrisa’s cheerful singsong, “Roger that!”

Buying a little more time to recover, Gil asks, “What was that about a knife, anyway? I don’t remember knives in the Clark case.”

Malcolm dips his head to hide the way his face pinches and starts down again. “Call it a hunch,” he says, summoning up a wide grin that falls away the second Gil’s attention focuses on reaching the first floor in one piece. If he hadn’t confused the vision of Endicott’s death, did that mean the details had changed, knife to cross-peen hammer? It had happened often enough before.

He hasn’t decided yet what he wants to do with his ability returning in full force, but if he planned on trying to get rid of his future sight again, he probably would’ve done it by now. What troubled him more than the visions now was figuring out what affected their clarity and accuracy. How are some so clear, both in detail and coherence, and others mere glimpses of shadow in the fog caught at the corner of his eye?

Why had he seen so much when he’d been locked in the basement, except for the very thing he most needed to know? He’s figured out a handful of triggers over the years, such as heightened stress, extreme pain—funnily enough, common triggers for anxiety and panic disorder. A record of the situations surrounding the onset of a vision could give him more insight, maybe even suggest a way to influence—

“Where are you headed?” Gil asks.

 _Nowhere useful_ , Malcolm thinks, pushing aside his spiraling thoughts. “Ainsley’s. She hasn’t been answering my calls, and I’d like to see how she’s doing.”

“You could text her like a normal millennial.”

Waiting in the foyer for Gil to catch up, Malcolm slings his hands into his pockets. He’s about to toss off something flippant about the concept of normal and the Whitly family history when he frowns and genuinely thinks about the suggestion. Ainsley rarely picks up or calls back after he’s left a voicemail. She responds via text with more regularity.

“I suppose I could,” he concedes.

Breath labored, Gil slaps an “atta boy” hand down on his shoulder. A long moment passes before he steadies. “Tell me how it works out for you, kid,” he says, giving Malcolm’s shoulder another pat.

“Need a lift back to the precinct? My driver’s waiting.”

“Thought you’d never ask.”

* * *

## Ainsley

####  **Today** , 2:23 PM

Malcolm
    Are you trying to make me worry, or is that just a convenient coincidence?

**Delivered**

In the car outside the station, Malcolm sizes up the message one last time, though it’s obviously too late now to change it. He thinks his intent is clear—honest, humorous, with just a touch of admonishment. He decisively closes the app and then sits with the phone wrapped in his fist, subconsciously tapping the speaker against his lips as he waits and waits. Lack of an immediate response is the major drawback to texting instead of talking, in his opinion, along with the lack of visual or audio cues to verify tone and context.

## Ainsley

####  **Today** , 2:23 PM

Ainsley
    you call more than dad
    before you say it no i havent been picking up
    also im fine but mom wants to do breakfast tomorrow

Malcolm
    Breakfast? At the house?

Ainsley
    i guess are you going to go?

Malcolm
    Ainsley, you literally just told me about it. I have no idea.

Ainsley
    like you have a job

Malcolm
    Actually, I’m on a case right now.

Ainsley
    anything i should know about? jk

Malcolm
    I’ll call mom and see if I can talk her into brunch at Le Coucou. Where are you right now?

**Delivered**

Ainsley
    why do you want to know?

Malcolm stares at the blinking cursor, momentarily stumped like he knows he wouldn’t be if he could hear her voice. He sends back a simple _never mind,_ gauging it tongue-in-cheek enough to show he’s both not offended and wasn’t prying.

He tells the driver to take him home and settles back. It’s probably best to give her space for some time yet. He confirmed that she’d followed his instructions regarding incriminating evidence as soon as he had been able and hadn’t pushed beyond that. They’re similar in enough ways that he suspects too many inquiries about how she’s coping will only make her more liable to pretend she’s “fine.” From what little interaction he’s gotten, he gets the sense she’s pieced herself back together enough that a sideways look won’t shatter her.

Tucking his shoulder against the car door, forehead to the cool glass, he wishes she’d answer the phone. It would settle his own glued-together skin if he could hear it in her voice.

The world going by outside the window looks distant, a little unreal, like an abstracted photograph or an exceptionally fine painting where everything is immediately recognizable for what it is, but a closer look reveals clever shadows of what _isn’t_ there. He’d forgotten it was like this after a powerful vision. As a child, he didn’t have the words to describe the disconnect he felt, or the strange lingering nausea that would flare up unexpectedly for weeks afterward, so he hadn’t tried.

He’d seen so many people over the years he hadn’t been able to help, that he hadn’t even realized were real people in need of it. If he’d had more to go on from what he’d seen leading up to Endicott’s death, he might’ve figured out what was really going to happen in time to prevent it, or at least guarantee that whatever it was stayed between just the two of them.

The feeling persists even after he’s gotten home and let Sunshine out to play. Deliberately ignoring it, he perches on a stool to watch as she moves a tiny blue jingle ball from place to place around the kitchen island, sometimes tossing it with her beak to make it jangle madly, other times picking it up delicately to set with a little nudge as close as possible in front of him. Everything beyond his kitchen fades.

It isn’t until she’s bored with the toy and starts trying to pry off the lid on one of his pill bottles that reality stomps rudely back.

“No biting,” Malcolm warns, used to her habit of checking to see if he remembers the rules as well as she does. He offers a finger for her to hop onto, lifting her up to his shoulder where her tiny claws pluck at cotton. His gaze slides over the bottle she’d been gnawing on, then slides back, hooked on it.

During his college years, after the Surgeon had been imprisoned but before they’d found a treatment plan that worked, the visions became hazy and infrequent, and always impossible to connect until after the fact—a student in his year who overdosed, a professor’s wife killed in a collision. All tracing back, to some degree, to him. When he became a field agent, the number of visions spiked, more than he’d ever seen even as a child. But it wasn’t until the FBI assigned him to the Laurence Chase Clark case that he realized how much he’d already known going in, and what it cost.

Never were his glimpses of the future as volatile as they had been during that case. Sometimes, the changes were slight, almost inconsequential. Other times they showed him running hellbent in the exact opposite direction he should. He killed twice more under Malcolm’s watch, and he’d seen both women die in a dozen different ways in the months it took to track Clark down in Altoona.

He upped his medication at the close of that case for a reason. Not once has he regretted putting the lid firmly on that box, choosing to let his observations inform his training and allowing that to guide him. He’d even come to accept as truth what Gabrielle had told him all along: the visions were a way for his mind to present him with answers, and those answers could only come from what he already knew. As events transpired and his understanding changed, so too did the so-called visions of the future.

That’s all changed since Watkins. All the little things he’d forgotten— _made_ himself forget—have been filtering back; old suspicions about what might trigger a vision, how degrees of distance between him and the crime might affect its clarity, everything he’d once considered studying on his own but set firmly behind him after what the Clark case put him through.

He hasn’t altered his medication in years, and now that they’re back regardless, he can’t ignore them. Faced with the possibility of reliving the Clark case all over again, haunted by endlessly changing visions, how could he refuse to do everything in his power to ensure that this time, it plays out in their favor right from the start?

“I probably shouldn’t stop taking my pills,” he says to Sunshine. “Right?”


	5. You Can't Buy This at the Corner Store

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Related track: [Kool Aid by KIRBY](https://youtu.be/SVZJZg5MTt0) (YouTube).

In the two days since the discovery of Lindsay Harris, they’ve run down dozens upon dozens of leads. For a journalist and a musician, it came as no surprise that they spent as much time contacting people who weren’t very fond of or outright hated her as they did speaking with friends and acquaintances. Family was about the only thing the woman didn’t seem to have.

Dani knows that many people don’t mind the lack, or are even happier for it. As Edrisa folds the sheet back from the victim’s face, she still can’t help but think it’s sad. If no one steps up to claim the body, they’ll ship it off to Hart’s for burial.

“Bright correctly identified the tool that made these marks on the victim’s neck,” Edrisa says. She places her gloved hands on the victim’s temples, then frowns. “Where is he, by the way? Should I wait?”

“Stuck in traffic, maybe,” JT says. He presses his lips together and catches Dani’s eye. “Wouldn’t have that problem if he’d just take the damn train.”

“Get on with it, we can fill him in later,” Gil tells Edrisa. He’s parked himself on the edge of a cabinet, the cane he hates toting around hooked on it beside him. He clearly doesn’t want to be down here any longer than necessary, a feeling that Dani shares.

“Okay, well—”

Just as Edrisa lifts the corpse’s head up, the door bursts inward. Bright staggers in, face slightly flushed like he’s booked it from the other end of the block which, knowing him, can’t be far off. “I’m here! Sorry, I’m late,” he says in a rush, jostling Dani as he squeezes into the space between her and JT, though there’s plenty of room around the autopsy table. She gives him some elbow room, anyway.

“Bright! Don’t worry, you didn’t miss anything,” Edrisa says, beaming. When Gil clears his throat, she refocuses on her report turning the victim’s head to the side to expose the bruising pattern. Fully exsanguinated beneath the artificial lights, the marks look like black smudges of paint on ash-gray skin. “I was just about to show everyone you hit the nail on the head with the cause of these bruises.”

“Great,” Bright chirps, smiling so hard his entire face scrunches up. He goes up on his toes and leans forward with eagerness that Dani’s only seen at grotesque crime scenes, when he’s riding high on that rush of a brand new and unusual psychology to unravel.

Seemingly from nowhere, Edrisa produces a pair of blacksmith tongs that are half her size, hefting them up and opening the jaws. Carefully, she levers them towards the body. “Check it out. A perfect match.”

“Where do you even find one of those?” JT asks.

“I know a guy,” Edrisa says offhandedly. Mostly, she’s back to acting normal around them—or what passes as her normal—after harboring some obvious resentment for their pursuit of Bright as a suspect. Dani doesn’t take the occasional prickle of irritation personally.

Bright, meanwhile, fidgets like a toddler told to sit down and keep his hands to himself. His twitchy fingers almost touch the body more than once, regardless of how many times he crosses his arms or shoves his hands into his pockets. Close to suggesting he just glove up already, Dani thinks twice about how an invitation to poke and prod at a dead body might turn out when Bright’s already dancing in place, and instead inches another half-foot away.

“No foreign tissue under the nails,” Edrisa says, passing the tongs absently to JT. He shoots Dani a what-am-I-supposed-to-do-with-these type of look, and all she can offer is a shrug.

“There’s additional bruising on her forearms, here and here,” Edrisa goes on, shifting the sheet to point out the marks on the victim’s arm and torso, “and other indications of defensive wounds here.”

Two small, dark-edged marks running parallel to each other catch Dani’s eye. “Are those burns?”

Edrisa nods excitedly. “They are! From a handheld stun gun, probably mid-range voltage, very basic. Some of the blood on scene doesn’t match the victim’s. No word yet on system matches.”

“Stunned, not drugged?” Bright asks, his manic energy abruptly subsiding as he explains. “Clark was a patient killer. He stalked and roofied his victims, arranging it so they relied on him to get home. It’s part of how we tracked him down.”

“So cool,” Edrisa breathes, her attention fixed on Bright, eyes alight. “Yes. I mean, no. You’re right.” Giving herself a visible shake out of it, she clarifies, “The tox screen came back clean. Nothing out of the ordinary in her system.”

“Interesting.”

Gil asks, “Does this change your profile?” as he gathers up his cane to stand. Now more than ever, Dani’s sure some of Bright’s bad habits come from the lieutenant. Gil should be at home with his feet up, bored to tears by daytime TV, or at least riding a desk for another few weeks. The one thing he shouldn’t be is elbows deep in a case like this.

“What I had of one. If he didn’t follow Clark’s MO, and with the lack of forced entry, it increases the likelihood our victim knew the suspect,” Bright replies, acting squirrely again with his tongue darting out to wet his lips, his gaze hopping from the corpse to the tongs to an empty autopsy table. He goes stock-still, focused intently at nothing.

Taking a copy of Edrisa’s report, JT heads for the exit. He gives the empty table a pointed glance and mouths, “That’s creepy,” over Bright’s head. Dani agrees wholeheartedly, but all she does is offer another shrug; creepy is one of the least disturbing things Bright has going for him today.

In the hall, she ends up lingering behind while Gil and JT head out. “You have too much coffee this morning, Bright?” she asks, falling into step beside him.

“No,” he says, quick and breezy. “Why do you ask?”

She takes hold of his elbow, and he stops dead in his tracks, as surprised by it as she is. Aiming for neutral, she lets go and gestures back at the morgue. “Because you can’t keep still and you look like you’re seeing ghosts.”

“I didn’t sleep much—what’s new? I’m just a little wound up and… weirdly itchy.” He pulls a face, fiddling with his cuffs, the neck of his shirt. “I’ll have to ask my housekeeper if he changed something with the laundry. Probably just an allergic reaction.”

One day, Malcolm Bright is going to not lie directly to her face. She grits her teeth and lets it slide to focus on the issue at hand, which is their pet consultant acting like he’s going out of his skin. “Want to go for a walk? Burn off that fake, overtired energy?”

The idea seems to put him as off-balance as the touch to his arm. Is she overstepping? Trying to be friends with Bright feels like picking a path through a minefield. “What about the case? A superficial copycat means I’m back to square one on my profile.”

“Go on up if you want, but I’m headed out for some lunch.”

He looks genuinely torn.

Dani gets it, sort of. It’s hard for her to put something down once she’s sunk her teeth into it, too. She softens her expression. “Look, if you need to get to it now, don’t let me stop you.”

“No,” he says, blinking and staring at her with renewed intensity. “A walk sounds good, and I haven’t eaten besides—yeah, I should probably consider lunch at this point.”

“Need to fuel that big brain of yours,” Dani says, sliding her hands into her pockets. A short distance from the elevators, she changes her mind and nods towards the stairwell instead.

Bright makes a grab for the door, but Dani gets there first. His mouth twists as he accepts her gracious gesture to go ahead, slipping by and hitting the stairs with abandon. Following at his heels, she notices that despite the restlessness, his movements are still smooth and purposeful. His hand is light on the rail, the stretch of his legs graceful as he nimbly skips a step and the thin weave of his suit pulls at his thighs, taut against his—

Refusing to be embarrassed about the slight rise in her temperature, Dani keeps an eye on her own footing from then on. Fresh air is welcome as they hit street level, the abnormal quiet of the morgue blasted away by the blare of traffic. The sidewalks are jam-packed with the usual midday hustle and bustle. The smell of food trucks, exhaust, and the buzz of a hundred different conversations all meld together in a balm for the stale, sterile feeling clinging to Dani’s skin.

Enjoying the relief and the prospect of lunch, she asks, “How’s your sister doing?”

“Avoiding me,” he says, a little bitterly. “Which isn’t exactly true, I suppose. We had brunch with my mother yesterday, and she doesn’t enjoy being in the house any more than I do, now.”

“A serial killer hiding in your dad’s creepy murder basement who chased her through the house with an axe didn’t make her blink, but a scumbag bleeding out on the living room floor does?”

Bright’s eyes flash as he looks at her sidelong. “John Watkins is sitting in Rikers awaiting trial, an abstract more easily put out of mind. The rug that’s no longer in the sitting room? That’s a tangible, visible reminder. Ainsley’s mind is—she’s free to conjure up an unlimited number of versions of what happened in there, and our imaginations are often much worse than reality.” He loses steam on a sigh. “Mother seems to get something out of being the martyr, but I think Ainsley, like me, would prefer to keep her distance from the house as much as possible.”

Despite going along with everyone else in accepting the flimsy self-defense excuse Bright’s lawyers served up, she has her own suspicions about what exactly went down between him and Endicott. Whatever it was, it shook Bright a hell of a lot more than he’s letting on. “Fair enough,” she concedes, wondering what Ainsley knows now that she didn’t that night in the hospital. “Sandwich?”

Bright looks to where she’s pointing out a small deli crowded between a camera store and an electronics repair shop. Like always, the only hint it’s even there is the folding daily specials clapboard sign propped up drunkenly against the repair shop’s window.

“Would you mind just grabbing me something small and plain?” Bright asks, reaching for his wallet. His lopsided, wouldn’t-you-know-it smile is weirdly charming. “I want to check in with Ainsley.”

Dani gives her head a shake; she’s got a soft spot for families, and Malcolm never thinks to hide how much he loves his. “I got this. You’ll just owe me one.”

Cash in hand, head cocked to the side like his little pet parakeet, he says, “I already owe you one. Before the whole ‘accused of murder’ thing?”

“So you’ll owe me two,” she says, spinning on her heel to leave him behind, “or a really _nice_ lunch.” Whatever’s going on with his sister, it’s probably just some same old, same old Whitly family drama.

A cluster of bells announces her arrival, catching the attention of the bear of a man perched on a stool behind the counter. The neat, tight row of tiny tables are empty save for an older man with a paisley tie typing furiously away at his keyboard, an air of impatience clinging to him like cheap cologne. Save that and the rattle-clank of the industrial fridge, it’s quiet. She grabs a couple bags of chips and gives Tito a nod. Today, his apron is a riot of neon lightning bolts over a plain white tee and well-worn jeans.

“Usual,” Tito asks, his customary greeting, “or you in a rush? The ones in the case are still fresh.” When she points at the barely legible menu on the whiteboard above his head, he neatly folds his newspaper and heaves to his feet. Leaving it on his seat, he lumbers off to wash his hands.

“Two today,” she says as he wipes his hands dry. “Light on the toppings for one.”

Curiosity piqued, Tito peers past her through windows plastered with stickers, advertisements, and signs that are older than she is. “You leave your rich boy consultant cooling it out there?”

“Has JT been running his mouth again?”

“When isn’t he?” At six-foot-four, he easily grabs a fresh loaf of bread off the top of the cabinets. Most cops hit the shop at the far end of the block where the owner insists they don’t pay a thing, but ever since she and her partner first set foot in here, it’s been their go-to. The teens who take the nearby train to school never try for a five-fingered discount at Tito’s, and she respects that.

Tito keeps on looking out the window, his hands moving from cutting board to veggies and back again smooth as a concert pianist. “Damn pretty for a white boy, I’ll give him that.”

From where she stands with a hip cocked against the counter, Dani’s got a clear sightline on Bright tapping away on his phone, a little frown line between his brows. Blip on the stairs aside, she doesn’t really notice his looks much anymore. She wouldn’t call him her type for a truckload of reasons, but Tito’s not wrong: Bright is definitely easy on the eyes. “I’ll let him know you think so.”

“Girl, you can do more than that. Hand that boy my number and tell him Papi can flip the sign, strip off that suit, and give him twenty minutes he’ll never forget in the storeroom.”

Her gaze immediately drops to the cracks in the faded linoleum, and she pinches the bridge of her nose. She can picture Bright half-naked in a janitor’s closet way too easily, but it’s not Tito sharing his space in her mind. “Jesus, Tito, I work with that man.”

“Oh, I see how it is. If he’s not strictly for the D, what’s stopping you?”

Dani stares disbelievingly at Tito’s wide grin. “I _work with_ that man.”

“Don’t shit where you eat is advice you can ignore for _consultants_ ,” Tito says authoritatively. He slaps a pair of sandwiches wrapped tightly in cling film onto the counter and starts ringing her up. “You can quote me on that.”

She turns a laugh that’ll only encourage him into a dismissive snort. “Whatever you say, Tito,” she hums as she pulls a twenty out of her wallet, handing it over with her gaze fixed pointedly on the sandwiches.

“I’m just sayin’, Dee.” Passing over her change, he ducks his head equally pointedly into view. “Prime real estate like that doesn’t stay on the market long. Better get a move on if you don’t want someone else snapping that tight lil’ ass out from under you.”

“Uh-huh, yeah,” she says, rolling her eyes, “I’ll get right on that one, boss,” maybe a little sharper than she means to, but it’s _Bright._ He’s attractive, ridiculously smart and unbelievably dense by turns, and carries more baggage than a 747. He sleeps cuffed to his own bed, for chrissakes, and she’d already spent more time thinking about that little tidbit of life with Bright way more than she needed to.

She surfaces from _that_ image to find Tito smiling smugly as he drops back into his seat, snapping out his newspaper triumphantly. She stomps off with their lunch, playing it up and playing along so Tito doesn’t get any more fool ideas in his head like maybe he’s on to something, then forgets all about him and his juvenile teasing as she catches the tail end of Bright’s call.

“… since then, and you’ve been…” The sigh rips up through his chest, and what little she can see of his face from this angle is strained. After a pause where he chews hard on the inside of his cheek, Malcolm murmurs, “Just talk to me, Ains. Please.”

Whatever his sister’s response, it’s not the one he was hoping for. His entire body language shifts, his face falling flat and lips stretching into a thin line, his shoulders stiffening as his back straightens. “Right, of course not,” he sighs in a resigned monotone, before catching sight of Dani holding up the sandwiches to get his attention. He dismissively says, “I need to go, case stuff. Later,” in a way that doesn’t match the concern on his face, and ends the call.

“Lunch!” Bright chirps too loudly, trying for a blinding smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “So, back to the precinct? I can probably make some good headway with—”

“Bright,” Dani drawls, “it’s lunch,” hoping her chiding stare provides enough cover for the way she sizes him up from head to toe. His tense shoulders halfway up to his ears and his shaking hands just barely visible from where he’s got them stuffed into his pockets are alarm bells going off in her head. “If I wanted to work on the case, I wouldn’t have left in the first place. C’mon, you look like you haven’t slept in days—I know, what a shocker. Take a break from being a genius for twenty minutes,” she challenges.

His hesitation needles at Dani like a splinter. She can’t ignore the thousand hints that something is off, and it’s not the usual Bright bullshit. Eventually, she tires of waiting and heads around the corner and doesn’t dwell too long on the relief that bubbles up as he shuffles along behind her.

Up one block, down another, not a word spoken. At the fountain plaza, she takes a seat on the wide basin wall, tilting her head back and drawing a deep breath full of the misty spray. On a different day, the smell of overused chlorine would be something to tolerate. Today, it’s far preferable to the stink of formaldehyde in her nose and thick at the back of her throat.

Bright’s back to his wavering indecision. She peels back the cling wrap on her sandwich and takes a bite, eyebrows raised expectantly. He makes like it’s the locale giving him pause, eyeing the concrete and his perfectly tailored slacks, then drops to her left like he’s doing her a favor. He recoils from the sandwich tossed into his lap like he expected her to slap him with it. She pauses before taking another bite. “You good?”

Despite the darting glance he shoots her way, his posture relaxes, his wry smile easy and open and affable. “Besides the unsolved murder victim cooling on a slab in Edrisa’s lab and the fact that I haven’t slept more than an hour at a time for the last week? You bet.”

She snorts around another mouthful of her lunch. His entire demeanor is suddenly so different that she wonders if she’s looking for things that aren’t there. She’s had training on how to process a self-defense fatality at her own hands despite the long odds she’ll ever experience it in her career, but she knows she wouldn’t handle it as easily as Bright seems to. But then, Malcolm Bright has been through trauma she can’t even fathom; he’s probably got neat little compartments dotted throughout his consciousness to tuck things like Endicott away in until he’s got a when and where to process it. That sometimes things escape when he isn’t looking seems to be par for the course.

She might not trust her eyes, but she trusts her instincts. “Everything good with Ainsley? Sounded a little tense.”

His jaw clenches briefly, there and gone in a blink with a smile firmly in place. “When have my interactions with my family ever been anything but?” Dani gives him a look much more patient than she feels, and he sighs. “She’s fine.”

“Right,” Dani says agreeably. “Just like you’re always fine.”

His smile slips more towards a smirk as he twists to face her, one leg folded up with his knee inches from her hip. She blames Tito for noticing that detail, but the genuine humor in Malcolm’s eyes that tugs a smile from her lips is on her.

She peels more plastic away from her sandwich. Bright seems dedicated to playing dumb, but she’s dealt with that kind of behavior plenty. _Rule one of interrogation: always keep them talking._ “What’s up with that Clark case, anyway? Gil’s mentioned it a few times, too.”

Predictably, Bright lights right up, his hands—steady as a rock—coming up to gesture as he talks. “Five bodies, three states, he begins, and launches into more detail than Dani strictly needed.

More than once she finds her attention drifting away from how Malcolm acts to the story he’s weaving. Creepy bits aside, it’s an interesting case, and there’s something hypnotic about the flow of Malcolm’s words. It’s a lot like the way he profiles, but instead of the view from inside the mind of the killer, it’s from the victims.

Truth be told, it’s unsettling. If it weren’t for the compassion in his voice, she might be worried. For all the things Malcolm is, though, cold-blooded isn’t one of them.

When he pauses to eat some of his sandwich, a small smile appears on his face. He’s genuinely enjoying her interest and her company, and realizing that she enjoys his too, her attention drifts.

She’s always liked this little plaza. She’s never seen it empty, but it’s always peaceful. It’s usually populated by regulars from nearby offices, and unfamiliar faces that wander through pick up on the vibe. Whenever she needs a moment to breathe, settle back into her own skin, this place helps.

Beside her, Malcolm seems quietly content with his sandwich and the view. Dappled sunshine peeks through the trees, glowing against his hair and catching the blue of his eyes. He’s so many things to so many people that he rarely seems to just be himself, and here he is with her, licking crumbs off his thumb, his unbuttoned jacket dangerously close to a dip in the fountain.

Tito’s warning to get a move on echoing in her head is about as welcome as a rainstorm.

If her friends ever caught wind of it, they’d encourage her the whole way. But as wonderfully supportive as they are, as a group, they tend towards snap decisions in dark clubs based on ten minutes of shouted conversation that inevitably lead to a gallon of shed tears and at least two gallons more of ice cream.

And even though she knows Bright a hell of a lot better than Chelsea knows last Friday’s hookup, that doesn’t exactly help. He’s fresh off the suspect list for two murders, tangled up yet again with one of their active cases, and if that wasn’t enough to warn her off any inclination she might have had to see where things could go between them, his girlfriend is barely cold in the ground.

She blames no one but Tito for putting the image of Bright burning off that excess energy half-out of his suit in a nondescript supply closet in her head, and for the squirrely feeling in her gut when Bright looks up, smiling, and suggests they pick up where they left off.


	6. It's the Same Old Story, It's the Same Old Game

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **CHAPTER CONTENT WARNINGS:**  
>  \- attempted human trafficking
> 
> Related track: [Powerman by The Kinks](https://youtu.be/AH4goWjL71I) (YouTube).

Malcolm’s become a creature of habit, more from necessity than any deep-seated need to assert control over his environment, though he’ll grant there’s a fraction more of the latter than he’d like. His morning routine goes as usual, except again he finds himself standing at the counter with a handful of pills he doesn’t intend to take. Carefully, he puts the two he’d decided to cut out in the hopes for a break in the case back in their bottles.

Yesterday wasn’t great. So far, today’s just fine, but he won’t take that as a promise the jitters have left for good. Based on his medications’ half-life, it’ll be at least two more days before they’re out of his system, and if he’s lucky, he’ll have triggered a vision before then.

Feeling decently positive, he plucks an affirmation card from the stack. The stereo switches tracks to _Powerman._

_I do what I need to do to follow my dreams._

“A little on the nose,” he mutters, thumbing the edge of the card. He shoves aside the tiny voice that insists this is useless and closes his eyes, holding onto the scrap of optimism he woke up with. He repeats the affirmation twice, slowly and deliberately, using it to focus his thoughts for the day ahead.

His phone buzzes against the marble countertop.

Eyes flaring open, he snatches it up, leaving the card dropped in its place. “Gil, good morning,” he says, doing his best to keep the giddy eagerness rising in his chest at the prospect of a break in the case out of his voice. “Any news?”

“Kid, it’s two in the afternoon.”

Malcolm blinks. He pulls the phone back briefly to look at the screen: 2:17 pm. “So it is,” he says, brow furrowing. He keeps half of his attention on Gil while he assesses his current state: no cuffs at his wrists, no recent taste of toothpaste lingering on his tongue, showered and dressed ready for work. The cup of coffee he’d poured what he thought was only minutes ago sits untouched and stone cold.

How did he mistake the slant of light by Sunshine’s cage for morning? He quickly checks the level of her food and water, abruptly not trusting the memory of doing so before his shower.

“... got ahold of the owner. Dani and JT will meet you there,” Gil tells him. “I’ll text you the address.”

“I know where it is. Be right over,” he promises and firmly puts the unease aside. Losing time isn’t on the list of side effects generally he experiences when fiddling with his meds, but as long as it doesn’t happen again _right now,_ it can wait.

* * *

At the café-slash-record-shop in Gowanus, JT and Dani are waiting out front, Dani perched on the trunk of the Crown Vic with the heel of one boot braced atop the bumper, her sunglasses glinting in the sharp light arrowing into the street. The second he exits the town car, his attention is all on her, because all of hers is on him.

He had gotten used to the queasy push and pull of desperately wanting to get closer to her and fearing what will happen if he does, but it’s grown worse lately. There’s a constant question lingering around her, and it feels a lot like the same one hovering at the forefront of his mind whenever he tries to get Ainsley to talk to him about anything deeper than the weather.

_What are you hiding?_

It weighs on him like an anchor, all his secrets threatening to drag him under. He rarely gets the urge to take someone into his confidence, and of all the people he could even consider, Dani is one of the worst, not for his sake, but for hers. In a perfect world, he could tell her everything and not only would she believe him, she’d _trust_ him, help him keep his family from breaking under the strain of one too many cracks.

Painting on a smile, he asks, “You mind if I order a coffee inside? I’m a little under-caffeinated today,” and pretends not to see the quirk of Dani’s eyebrow.

“By all means,” says JT, desert-dry, “don’t let a murder investigation get in the way of the perfect pour-over.”

Inside, Public Records is a predictable modern industrial done in stark white paint and warm lighthouse oak. The long stretch of skylights allowing natural light to stream through is a welcome surprise, and it highlights the layout well. Malcolm hasn’t been here after dark, though he’s always been curious what shines through those windows at night, wondering if maybe the designer had used them to good effect there, too.

A scatter of patrons sit on metal stools and low-backed molded plastic chairs, a select few neck-and-shoulders deep in their second, third—definitely _fourth,_ for that one—cocktail.

Malcolm catches Dani’s faint nod of approval directed at the lo-fi hip hop playing at a volume suited to the afternoon crowd as she slides up alongside his beeline for the barista. “Over-correcting for yesterday?”

“Something like that.” The stick-thin guy behind the counter caught by Malcolm’s beaming smile bears a passing resemblance to the dom from their very first case together. Nico Stavros could pull off the well-groomed barista mustache, but he might have trouble with the expertly applied splashes of bright, glittery eyeshadow.

“Detectives Powell and Tarmel,” Dani says before Malcolm can order. “Your boss is expecting us and our consultant here.”

Not-Nico’s eyes flash with the usual mix of baseless worry and sudden curiosity that’s part and parcel of almost every interaction Malcolm’s seen between law enforcement and ‘respectable’ civilians. “She’s setting up for a show, I’ll call her for you.”

JT follows Not-Nico’s nervous glance at a plain door in the back. “That way?”

“Yeah, but—”

“We promise not to break anything,” Dani assures the barista, her tight-lipped smile promising to break anything and everything that needs breaking.

“Coffee,” Malcolm says to the question she shoots his way when he doesn’t immediately follow. He needs it, desperately, but something about the lone couple sitting in a booth along the wall keeps drawing his eye. The woman he’d noticed first, a momentary shock to the system from sun-bleached hair styled in waves and the same dot-print silk blouse Eve had worn to the theater.

That’s not what’s bothering him, though. Neither is it their hushed argument, the man airing his grievance with stage-whispers while his—date, Malcolm thinks, until he spots the ring— _fiancée_ does her best to keep up appearances.

“Bright,” Dani snaps, “we already waited twenty minutes for your ass,” her tone sharpening to narrow-eyed suspicion near the tail end.

“I’ll be right there,” he promises, fully intending to follow through. He’s as invested in finding out more on Lindsay Harris as they are, but the detectives can get started without him despite the courtesy of waiting. Public arguments are typically embarrassing or entertaining; in his case, informative learning experiences. This one, though… this one makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

Annoyed, JT tells Dani to drop it and go. Malcolm wishes he could do that, too, carry on with his day without another thought spared for the scene. All couples argue. The statistical increase for engaged or just-married couples is well documented, and given the stress from soon-to-be in-laws, combining households, or any number of related events, it’s not surprising that the argument looks to be mostly one-sided.

Malcolm pinches the bridge of his nose. Seventy-two hours into withdrawal, his focus comes and goes. At times, it’s as if he could pick out each individual thread weaving time and space together, tracing them as effortlessly as breathing from each action to reaction, from chaos to its conception. Then, in a blink, those threads unravel and snap, and every detail becomes both relevant and not, a cryptic rat’s nest of endless potential engulfing him.

_Concentrate. One thread at a time._

_Eve._

Hair and clothes; the shape of this woman’s face is also similar, despite the bold brows and neutral lipstick. She could easily pass as the younger Sanders sister. Beyond the surface, he notes her clenched hand, thumb tucked under her fingers and toying with the engagement ring. Her weight shifts onto her toes as if she’s ready to bolt from the booth; he can’t tell if it’s subconscious or not. She avoids looking directly at the man, a common trait for people averse to confrontation, and pulls back defensively when he leans hissing into her space.

Still no reason for the buzzing in his head demanding he pay attention.

No sign of obvious bruising, fresh or faded, no heavy makeup or specifically styled clothes for concealment, and there’s nothing in the way she moves or holds herself to suggest any injury. Her outfit says young professional, but her body language says she isn’t comfortable wearing it. He pins her age to mid- or late-teens, younger than he’d first estimated, when she forces a smile and lets the man enfold her hand in his.

She looks up, staring blankly at the sympathetic smile Malcolm offers. Her gaze slides sideways, pin-drop silence suddenly ringing in his ears as panic flashes across her face and her eyes drop to the table.

It’s not her physical resemblance to Eve that set alarm bells off, it’s her circumstances. The man isn’t her fiancé at all. She’s being trafficked.

The world recedes but for the two people in the booth. He feels about two steps behind his own body, an afterimage trailing in his own wake. Dani’s shout makes it through the haze, important enough for him to hear but not as important as getting this creep as far away from the girl as possible.

The guy stumbles to his feet, spitting curses and yanking his arm free of Malcolm’s rigid grip. Muffling a cry, the girl cringes back.

The sensation of being nothing more than a shade evaporates. He snaps back into place like an elastic band, dodging the guy’s off-center shove with a surge of adrenaline. Behind him, a door bangs open.

“What did you use to lure her away from her family? Acting job? Modeling gig?” Malcolm fires off, gauging their reactions to drive his barrage of questions. “New talent, right? Fashion Week,” and the girl’s eyes flash wide. “Face for a new line, only something came up last minute, but don’t worry, he’s got another job you can do—”

She lets out a small screech, gut-reaction denial, that cuts off abruptly as Dani circles around, badge out. But he can see the realization in her eyes, her face twisted as she acknowledges the terrible mistake of ignoring her suspicions to hold on to hope for a childish dream and the echoes of Eve vanish. In her place stands Sophie, a woman he thought for so long was dead, the sister who survived Endicott when Eve herself didn’t.

“She trusted you,” he says, finger pointed at the trafficker but the words aimed at himself, “You failed to protect her.”

“Back off, Bright,” JT says, muscling in, “I got this,” and the guy angrily spits, “What the hell’s he talking about?”

The warm scent of brewed coffee slips away, overpowered by a memory of soured water and rot. “You let her die,” Malcolm says, his fiery rage fading as blood drains from his face, a coldness like ash-gray skin bloated at the bottom of a river seeping into its place. He sees the hit coming, telegraphed straight from the guy’s shoulder and his shifting weight, a sucker punch aimed right at his gut that he can’t seem to dodge.

“Bright!” JT shouts when Malcolm staggers back, the wind driven out of him and exhilaration riding on its coattails in an ugly oil slick of knowing he’s the one who’d failed. Pain blossoms in his midsection, blunt fingers of it reaching into his chest to squeeze tight around his lungs as their names echo in his head; Sophie and Eve and their needless grief, Ainsley’s undeserving horror. His throat burns as he tries to suck in air. His pulse is loud, throbbing in time with the room around him, breathing when he can’t, expanding and contracting.

The blackness would be welcome except for what awaits him in it.

_Inky darkness pools into silhouettes. Light filters slowly through the spaces between, coalescing not into the shape of bright tables and high ceilings, but a stark neon glow of blue and amber._

_In a room adjacent to where he stands he sees audio equipment through a half-window, two microphone booms mounted to the desk set beneath it. Beside an overturned desk chair, a man lies face down._

_The knife in Malcolm’s hand glows an unreal, ominous red. Dried blood flakes onto his cuff, odd when the blade is glistening wetly. The fingers clutching at the handle are unfamiliar, shorter and meatier than his own, uneven lines of dirt built up under blunt, cracked fingernails. Not his hand at all._

_With that realization comes new awareness. Noise-canceling headphones hang from the corpse’s neck as if they’d slipped off, but the gaping wounds carved into his back group together in a savage flurry that tells him they were ripped free. A dark stain spreads out beneath the body, just like—_

Like Endicott, Malcolm thinks, but before he can slip into the past, he rips ruthlessly free of the memory, desperate to see more of this future.

_Above the window, the ‘On Air’ sign is off, but just beneath it, a smaller sign sits mounted to the wall, the words blurry and indecipherable. He leans forward, squinting to make sense of the letters as they swirl into one another. He shakes his head, tries to summon up his focus, and looks again, blinking—_

—at the slender hand on his arm just above the elbow. Dani’s hand firmly steers him away from where Not-Nico is sitting with the girl. An older woman Malcolm assumes is the manager hovers protectively, one of Dani’s cards clutched in her hand.

“Bright,” Dani hisses, giving his arm a much gentler shake than her grip would suggest, “what the _fuck_ is going on with you?” He tries to blink away the fog tucked around him like a shock blanket, certain he’s failed when her other hand comes up to steady him, thumb pressed into the too-tight muscles of his shoulder. “Is something wrong with your meds?” she whispers, quietly concerned.

He bites his lip on a giggle. “Can’t be wrong if I’m not on them,” he says, grinning wide and tapping his finger several times in quick succession against his temple. Dani doesn’t seem impressed by his brushing up on internet culture.

“Oh my God, Bright,” she groans, “you’ve got to be shitting me.”

“I wouldn’t lie to you,” he says earnestly.

Her hands fall away and she crosses her arms. “Please. We both know that’s not true.”

That skewers the mirth buoying Malcolm up. “I wouldn’t lie to you without good reason,” he clarifies. “Just like I wouldn’t alter my medication without a _very_ good reason.”

“I want to trust you, Bright, I really do,” she says, the ‘but’ they both know hangs at the end of that sentence slipping neatly into silence as Dani shakes her head and squares her shoulders. She takes a deep breath to go on, and he doesn’t hear a single word, his post-vision high crumbling under the weight of realization.

A _male_ corpse in the recording studio he’d assumed would serve as the backdrop to Lindsay Harris’s murder, the unfamiliar hand holding the knife they hadn’t found in her home. His visions the night Endicott died had been two separate murders muddled together, Lindsay Harris and this unknown man in a studio, further confused by his preoccupation with Ainsley’s sudden involvement in what he had been so sure would be his burden alone to bear.

What else might he have inadvertently carried over? How many times in the past had he assumed something changed between his vision of a murder and its execution, when in reality he had conflated what he’d seen of one case with another? How many deaths he had potentially left unsolved by closing cases and blithely writing off details that didn’t mesh?

Malcolm only discovered the bleed over in the Surgeon’s cases featured in his childhood nightmares when he studied the files. At the time, he had no reason to suspect that was anything but his developing brain’s attempt to deal with what he saw, both in his visions and his reality, and thought no more of it.

But now, he wonders if that bleed over is just a facet of how the visions work that he’d failed to notice, or if their shared connection with the Surgeon is responsible, which would then lead him to the possibility that Lindsay Harris and the unknown man in the studio also share a connection.

The same killer seemed unlikely given the complete lack of crossover in methodology. If his father was the connection before, it’s possible he could be again, but despite all the opportunities during transport to Claremont for Martin to escape, he hadn’t. He’s ashamed of the brief consideration he gives to Ainsley as the connection, but her perfectly manicured hands couldn’t be more different to the ones he just saw.

“—Herrera gets here, I’ll escort you home, okay?” Dani finishes.

Malcolm takes in the scene, piecing together what he’s missed. JT and the trafficker are gone, as is the girl. Not-Nico is back behind the counter, still shaken, while near the door to the back room the manager is wrangling a looky-loo sound guy in a ball cap who slowly winds a cable around his fist. The rest of the patrons have gone back to their drinks, the air abuzz with lingering excitement.

“I don’t really need a babysitter,” he says.

“But you _do_ want to know what the manager told us about Harris,” she counters. “And you owe me lunch. Why don’t we order in, you can share your ‘very good reason’ for ditching your meds, and we’ll call it even?”

He can easily agree to the first part, and possibly a fraction of the second if he can figure out a way to convey the salient parts without sounding like a madman. His stomach twists at the idea of telling her anything more—the visions, Endicott’s death, how much it means to him that she wants to be his friend, how much he wishes she could trust him fully.

If only he could trust her first.


	7. Is It the Sweet Things You Fear?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Related track: [Shadows (feat. Debbie Harry) by Future Islands](https://youtu.be/XpDbwHbQ_Ak) (YouTube).

Since JT hijacked their ride, Dani has Bright call a town car. Sitting in the cushy backseat beats aggressively hacking her way through the irate snarl of traffic, but it also takes away her excuse to focus on that instead of Bright’s rambling.

His silence lasted all of three blocks before he started in on the coffee he’d finally gotten his hands on. Halfway across the bridge, his lecture on the two main varieties of beans in the world and which he suspects were used to fuel his rant is edging on manic, words tumbling free one after the other with barely a pause for breath.

This isn’t like the Jell-O conversation where he’d been starved for company. On some level, he seems genuine in wanting to share his fascination with her, but whatever filter might normally sit between his brain and the anxious rush of information flew out the window by way of his empty coffee cup.

Three to five minutes out from the loft, his impersonation of a Wikipedia article peters off. The quiet crowds in, and when her own thoughts grow loud, she almost misses his voice.

Tasteless jokes are a sometimes specialty of Bright’s, but never about going off his meds. Missing a dose had seemed as nerve-wracking to him as being left with nothing to do and no distractions, or worse, uninvited to a case. While his mood has bounced all over the board these last few days, it never swung close to anything like that kind of fear.

There have been plenty of moments the same as this, though, his motor run down and his movements syrupy, his fingertips absently rubbing back and forth, back and forth, on a patch of stubble or the shell of his ear or, like now, along the curve of his mouth bitten red. His nails are blunt and neat. Teeth flash white between parted lips, catch and tug on the soft skin of the lower, then vanish again with the next pass of his hand.

Face warm at catching herself staring, she drags her gaze to the window. Thankfully, Malcolm’s a million miles away, which is exactly why she’s comfortable staring at him at all.

No matter what direction she comes at it, everything that’s off with him—really off, not just his particular brand of strange—traces back to that night with Endicott in his mother’s house. He might have put the name Whitly behind him, but he hadn’t turned his back on his family. Whatever shadow Endicott’s death cast over them, he can’t shake it and it shows.

Just like he can’t shake his father, and god, she can’t even imagine the lasting effects of what went down in Martin’s Claremont cell. Studying crime scene photos of long-dead victims, as tough as it might be, couldn’t compare to standing by while your serial killer father digs his thumbs into a man’s eyes until they pop like grapes. She can still hear Malcolm’s cry ripping out of him like a scream.

JT would tell her to leave it alone. It’s Bright’s life, Bright’s mistakes to make, and he wouldn’t be wrong. He wouldn’t be right, either, because Bright needs them as much as she hates to admit they need him. They’re all damn good at their jobs, but there’s a reason Major Crimes handles cases as a team instead of the usual divisional delegation. More than she expected, Bright’s become a necessary part of why it works.

They pull up to the curb outside his place. All that hyped-up restlessness flips back on like a switch as he jumps out of the car and dashes around to hold her door and offer a hand. She’s not above one when it would be a genuine help, especially if she’s in heels or wearing something beautiful and impractical that hobbles her mobility. Obviously that’s not the case here and now, but she plays along anyway, sliding her hand into his grasp and letting it linger as she stands.

He doesn’t seem the type to have a delicate masculine ego that needs babying, but what does she know? Maybe holding the door for him at the morgue put a dent in his pride. Given her track record with men, she wouldn’t be so surprised. Bright puts up a lot of fronts.

“What should we order?” he asks once they’re inside, gliding up the steps backwards with the grace of a dancer. The options he rattles off don’t really hold any appeal. Lunch had been an excuse to see him home, and now that they’re here, any appetite she’s got left after the incident in the coffee shop fades from slim to nonexistent.

There’s a new lock on the door. A new frame and fresh paint, too. The last time she stood outside Malcolm’s door was to bust it in and place him under arrest. She drifts a touch over the wood.

“If you’re not hungry,” he says, somehow level-headed enough now to read her like he hadn’t in the ride over, “you can just fill me in on what the manager had to say. I just thought it would be—”

“Manager didn’t give us anything,” she admits, lingering in the entryway. “A few names to run down and that’s it. No red flags.”

A beat, and Bright says, “Ah,” in a way that lets her know he’s followed the logic. Tossing his keys onto the kitchen island, he shakes off his jacket, drapes it over one stool while he turns to sit on another. She can’t tell if he’s staring at the floor in disappointment or zoning out again.

“Bright—”

“Do you want to stick around for a bit anyway?” he asks, glancing up. “I can call the driver back, if you’d rather, and make sure _you_ get home safely.”

Dani takes a half-step forward. “Do you really think you ought to be alone if you’re off your meds? I’ll stick around.” She forces a small smile that, after a heartbeat, feels genuine. She won’t ignore her instincts again and take it at face value when Malcolm acts like he’s got his shit together.

“Sunshine is here,” he says, “I’m not alone.” His self-deprecating cavalier smile isn’t nearly as charming as he thinks. It could be, but a miasma of loss and lies and everything else she doesn’t want to acknowledge still clings to them. They’ve all been through so much in so little time, but Malcolm most of all. The more she thinks about it, the more impressive it is that he’s even functioning at all.

She had her share of sleepless nights worrying about Gil, of nerves rubbed raw by things she couldn’t hope to control. Malcolm lost a girlfriend, nearly lost a father _and_ the man who’d practically raised him, and on top of all that, gotten stabbed by a sociopath. She can empathize with it, but she’ll never understand it in a way that’s meaningful compared to the experience of it. That isn’t what Malcolm needs from her, anyway.

Dani shrugs out of her jacket and drapes it over his on the stool. She folds her arms on the marble, asks, “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” and waits.

He doesn’t explain a thing, but it’s as obvious as the tremor in his hand that he wants to. It’s hard to watch him struggle, carefully steering every topic back to the case, and so frustrating. If he cut the crap, maybe she could help. Whenever it seems like they’re getting somewhere, forming a genuine friendship, he balks, and it pisses her off because that’s always been her move and she knows down to the bone the damage it does.

She cut so many ties while in treatment, stuck to the steps as best she could and ended up burning countless bridges even as she desperately wanted someone, anyone, to stay. She begged, she screamed, and she prayed for it, but always where no one could ever hear. Getting over the losses that were her own damn fault took longer than anything else. It’s the lingering aftertaste of swallowing that bitter pill years ago that keeps her from running for the door.

Food eventually happens. They circle around what they’ve got so far in Harris’s case as they eat, taking turns beating each other over the head with all the things they _don’t_ know. Bright casually tosses in details like the victim’s brand of cigarettes or the pattern on her sheets as if they’re salient and somehow draws conclusions from them that actually might be. It’s entertaining, even interesting, but for where they are now, entirely unhelpful.

Conversation dries up along with the few bites of food left on Dani’s plate. She pushes it aside, too full to bother trying to drag that out but not yet ready to let it signal things wrapping up here. “I never asked,” she says, switching gears as Bright pokes at his Pad Thai, “how’s your mom holding up?”

He pauses with a hand in his hair, pushing it needlessly back when it hadn’t slipped one strand out of place. She recognizes it for the nervous tic it is and knows she’s struck a nerve when his eyes go wide and blank with surprise. _Rule two of interrogation: always keep them guessing._

He searches her face for answers to a question she can’t even begin to fathom, his gaze flitting from the slow lift of her eyebrow to lingering on the quirk of her mouth. Once he’s found whatever he’s looking for—or given up entirely, hard to say—he smiles wryly. “You’ve met my mother. She’ll hold up through anything with a fully stocked minibar and that stockpile of barbiturates she’s been hoarding since the eighties.”

Dani snorts a laugh, knuckling at her forehead. “Can’t say I don’t understand the appeal.”

Bright meets her sly sideways glance with a huff and a flash of teeth. A few months ago she would’ve missed the tension creeping through his easy expression, or written off the way he toys with the perfectly pressed crease of his pant leg as something like simple shyness.

The hardest lessons she learned as a rookie were actually _unlearning_ ones from the entirety of her life. Almost everyone felt the overwhelming urge to fill awkward silences, and even when they didn’t, letting one go on long enough usually did the trick. Bright knows how it works as well as she does and still he squirms. She’ll take what she can and forgive herself the satisfaction when he cracks.

“How about you, how are you holding up? I’m not the only one who almost lost a father figure to Endicott.”

She fires back, “Don’t profile me, Bright,” with no proper heat to it, sitting up and back. She can hear the gears already grinding away in his head, taking in her rebuff and the distance she hoped would come across less a defensive posture than folding her arms like she wanted to. Part of her can’t blame him; she’s been sizing him up off and on the same way for weeks. The rest prickles with annoyance. It reminds her too much of the looks from her handler when she was undercover and all the probing questions she stubbornly dodged.

Before that, it had been almost the same thing after her father died. She couldn’t count the number of times someone told her in one breath it was all right, everyone grieves differently, then in the next wanted to know why she didn’t do this, doesn’t she feel that, won’t she and could she and if only she. Even if Dani hadn’t already been inclined towards keeping to herself way back then, trying to pry her open and poke through her spilled guts like a first-year med student, inelegant and messy, never went over well. This time is no exception.

Before defensiveness can set her hackles rising, drive her to bite back and rend this fragile connection budding between them, Bright shrugs. “Fair enough.”

A moment of silence settles in. It should be uncomfortable, but instead, it’s more like the lightness of a storm recently passed. She glances at the stereo. “You mind?”

“Not in the slightest.”

It only takes a second to pair her phone. As she’s picking the right playlist—something with a heavy beat to vibe to but fairly chill enough to keep from triggering another manic episode—Bright slings her a questioning look, his eyes narrowing, his lips quirking. “Are you going to ask me to dance?”

“In your dreams, Bright,” she says, a soft laugh escaping under her breath as the music starts. Still, it’s easy enough to picture: sliding in to take his hand this time, letting his palm rest flat and warm against the small of her back and the easy sway of his body in sync with hers. No way would she let him out on the floor at a place like Estime’s, but there’s no question he knows how to move in a ballroom. “If you want to dance, you’re on your own.”

“But it’s way more fun with a partner,” he says, biting his lip with mischievous glee, and she’s slammed with déjà vu. If he jumps on the furniture again, she might want to go straight to slugging him and call it a night.

“You’re a little much for me when you’re like this, you know,” she admits.

A cloud passes over his face like a remnant of the storm that hadn’t hit. His gaze drops, and he rubs the back of his neck, mouth opening and closing a few times on aborted words until he finally looks up again, straight into her eyes, and says, “I’m sorry.”

She sighs. Wouldn’t life be so much easier if she didn’t care? She wants to believe an apology from him didn’t mean a thing, especially given how many she’s heard him utter over the relatively short time they’ve been working together. The real kicker is, he means every last one of them.

“Look,” Dani begins, holding up both hands palm out when it seems like Bright’s going to run his mouth again. “You don’t owe me anything. Your health is none of my business. But can you honestly tell yourself—not me, _yourself_ —that not taking your meds is good for you or anyone else? Say this ‘very good’ reason you’ve got that you won’t tell me is actually a good one. Is it the only one? The right one?”

Bright scrubs a hand over his mouth. For a few minutes there’s nothing but the music and the thoughts going through his head. She’s sure she noticed before now how expressive he is, but she doesn’t know if she’s noticed it quite like this.

“You’re telling me to take my meds,” he says eventually, and she shakes her head.

“I’m not telling you anything. I’m asking you to think long and hard about it. Promise me that much.”

Something flickers in his eyes and just like that, she knows she’s gotten through to him. He says, “I can do that.” What she hears is _you’re right._

Maybe that’s just what she wants to hear. It wouldn’t be the first time. But it is the first in a long, long time that she’s felt so invested in the outcome.

That’s got to count for something.


	8. No, Nothing Can Change You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Related track: [Worst in Me by Unlike Pluto](https://youtu.be/B75TuX2pEy8) (YouTube).

Unlike stepping into Lindsay Harris’s apartment, the instant Malcolm is brought past the tape and into this victim’s house, he knows precisely where he is.

Dani stands beside the open door leading to what will be a basement broadcasting studio, the mid-morning light from the kitchen windows haloing her curls in gold. She spots him almost immediately and quickly finishes up with the uniformed officer she’s been speaking with and turns to him to ask, “How are you feeling?”

Ready to toss off the usual response, he thinks instead about her startling vulnerability after the incident at Public Records and answers, “Not one-hundred percent, but I can promise you I’ll behave.” The small effort to give at least that rewards him with a glimpse of relief and something more intimate peeking out from beneath her veneer of professionalism. Pleased, he waves a hand towards the carpeted steps as if he has no idea what’s waiting for him down there. “Our victim’s in there?”

“Yeah. Marcus Lee, thirty-eight. Turned his basement into a recording studio,” Dani says, leading the way. “He hosts an internet radio show once a week and rents out a sound booth, so there’s been a decent number of people coming and going.”

A ton of evidence to sort through, then, and ninety-eight percent of it useless. “Any connection to our journalist-slash-musician?”

Dani clears the last step and faces him again. “Nothing immediately stands out, but it’s on the list to dig into. We’re looking at a completely different MO here.” Together, they make their way past a small waiting room that feels like it’s been plucked out of a dentist’s office and into the main sound booth that he knows all too well. “This one has rage-killing written all over it.”

“I’ll say. Someone wanted to silence him,” Malcolm says, his gaze fixing immediately to the edges of the wound carved across the dead man’s throat. Unlike in his visions, the body lies slumped forward in the chair instead of face down on the floor beside it. The flurry of stab wounds puncturing his polo shirt and into his back are the same. “What’s his show about?”

“Local sports,” JT answers from where he’s sifting through the top drawer of a filing cabinet tucked in the corner. “A quick check of online reviews didn’t turn up much, so he’s no Marty Glickman. Probably why he’s running like three businesses down here.”

Careful not to disturb Edrisa as she prepares to extract the knife, Malcolm circles the body. Everything else looks as expected. “Any recent controversies?” he asks, wincing at the sticky, wet ‘glop’ of the blade sliding free. He hates how familiar that sound’s become. The phantom taste of blood lingers on the back of his tongue.

“Knife in the back and a cut throat is about as subtle as messages go for somebody in the media,” Dani quips.

Or, Malcolm thinks, as a father trying to get the attention of a wayward, telephone-dodging son. Clark, the killer whose MO was emulated at the Harris murder, was his first catch after turning his back on Dr. Whitly. It’s tenuous, but there might be a connection to another of his cases, or to him directly. “What was the victim’s name again?”

“Marcus Lee,” Dani and JT answer in concert. Dani adds, “One of the neighbors called him Mark.”

There’s definitely something familiar here. He gnaws on the inside of his cheek as Edrisa turns the victim’s arm over to check for signs of self-defense, other injuries or bruising. A radio host named Marcus Lee. Goes by Mark. _Mark Lee… Mark—_

 _“Marked for Death!”_ Edrisa exclaims. “He’s—I mean, he was until very, very recently, the host of _Marked for Death,_ one of the original true crime podcasts. It’s too bad it never quite took off like some, but it has a dedicated following.” Her gaze darts sideways. “That I’ve heard about.”

Malcolm’s stomach turns into a chunk of solid ice. That’s exactly where he knows the name. He takes out his phone, gripping tight to hide the tremor in his hand, and looks up the podcast to confirm what he already knows.

“In fact,” Edrisa continues blithely, “his was one of the first independent shows to focus on the Surgeon with particularly critical blowback at anyone who downplayed Dr. Whitly’s crimes in favor of his medical advancement.” She sets the man’s arm down, catching Malcolm’s eye before beginning to examine the other. “Did you ever listen to it?”

“I try to avoid podcasts or documentaries about my family,” he says, aiming for a neutral, possibly wry tone with his pulse suddenly tripled. It’s not even a lie. Before he came to accept the absolute uselessness of it, he sought out every book, television special, or opinion piece published. None of them could tell him what he didn’t already know.

“Oh.” Edrisa’s face falls briefly, then brightens. “Well, if I remember correctly, it didn’t mention you much at all, so you didn’t miss anything.”

Between the over-the-top promo image for the podcast and the witty title, _The Surgeon: Bad Blood,_ Malcolm knows exactly which episode it is. He’d changed his name by then, but on their mother’s pleading, Ainsley hadn’t. That, plus her recent acceptance into Columbia, had made her a prime target for the same podcasters who liked to speculate on his life after turning in his own father. Of them all, _Marked for Death_ kept the spotlight on her for an uncomfortably long time, determined to unravel the so-called normalcy of her life from gossip, rumors, and second-hand interviews.

Dani steps casually into his line of sight. Voice pitched just above a whisper, she asks, “You think this and the copycat are connected through you?”

He honestly doesn’t know and says as much.

Her gaze bores into his, and he fights the need to look away. “Every true crime buff’s probably done something based on your father.”

“You think I don’t know that?” he snaps.

She steps back, expression pinched, and immediately he wishes he could take it back. Why can’t he ever say the right thing to her?

“It’s just....” He sighs and his gaze catches on the bare spot beneath the On Air sign where a plaque ought to be. There’s a bare nail, but as with the position of the body, it could be one of the details that changed between the vision’s timing and when the present came calling. For the dozenth time that day alone, he thinks how much easier this would be if she knew. “I have a bad feeling about this,” he finishes, his shoulders drooping.

“JT and I will look into it,” she says confidently. “If there’s a connection here, we’ll find it.”

* * *

Leaving the crime scene behind, Malcolm opts to stop avoiding the inevitable. The ferry ride back from Staten Island is unfortunately only a small pocket of calm for his jangling nerves; the moment the car drops him off at Claremont, they’re back in full force.

Regardless of how often he comes here, it feels like walking straight into the belly of the beast every time. What began as forcing himself to put one foot in front of the other has developed into a ritualistic self-check; he counts the steps from the curb to the entrance, and if the number is on the low end of average, he’s rushing and needs to slow down. If the number runs high, then he’s especially dreading the encounter. Both help to regulate his expectations.

Today, his steps are dragging. This had almost gotten easy for a short while, something he’d begun to even look forward to, like their chats during college. Though it makes times like these even more difficult, he’s thankful to have finally understood just how dangerous it is to let himself be continually charmed by the Surgeon.

And the Surgeon is very, very charming. So much so that Martin had spent a truly negligible amount of time mingling with the general prison population. The moment Endicott’s death hit the papers, and it became clear Dr. Whitly needed a new patron, someone had stepped right up to fill the void. Malcolm finds little comfort in the suspicion that this time around, instead of Martin holding all the cards, said patron is the one in control. He can only imagine the person to find prestige in having an infamous serial killer and brilliant surgeon in their pocket, and it isn’t anyone he’d like to meet at cocktail hour.

When Mr. David lets Malcolm into the cell, he nearly turns around and walks right back out again. His gorge rises as he stares at what this new benefactor believes to be suitable upgrades to Dr. Whitly’s lifestyle.

The third bookshelf he can forgive; his father’s grasp on reality is just fine, and he has zero desire for a lack of mental stimulation to change that. On its own, the larger bed and thick mattress, even the soft throw blanket piled at its foot, might be tolerable. It’s too much combined with the stylish storage trunk, several lush houseplants, and the plush Persian rug, but even that isn’t enough to make him genuinely want to vomit.

That honor goes to the newly installed skylight delivering a bright column of midday sun to the very middle of the room.

“Is that you, my boy?”

In the pooling warmth, his father, clad in a pair of short trunks and dark tanning goggles, relaxes on a folding lawn chair. A reflector propped up on his chest, like a book, bounces light back onto his face. The white threaded through his beard glows.

Swallowing the stinging burn at the back of his throat, Malcolm remarks, “Enjoying some new perks, I see.”

“A Vitamin D deficiency is not to be trifled with,” Martin says seriously as he sets the reflector aside. He pops the goggles up onto his forehead and straddles the chair to sit upright. The belt tethering him to the wall looks especially absurd now. “You’d have known about the improvements to my health care if you’d bothered to visit your dear old dad before now.”

“We, ah, haven’t been talking much, have we… Dad?” Malcolm says, expecting a spark of glee at the title. That, or a carefully controlled reaction to the thought of _his boy_ pulling away, but there’s neither. Just a slight tug at the corner of Martin’s mouth.

“Not since your murder charges were dropped,” Martin says conversationally. “Contrary to everything I read in the papers, I recall you singing a different tune that night, but maybe my memory is starting to go. Speaking of headlines, how’s my girl doing? She’s almost as bad as you about answering my calls.” His smile widens. “Almost.”

He already knew that Martin had been calling her more frequently, but the difference between hearing it from her and from their father is the chill, steely slide of a razor down his spine. Concentrating on keeping it off his face and out of his voice, he says, “She’s doing fine. And maybe we’d talk more often if you still called.”

Martin pauses in examining his fingernails, flicking away a bit of dirt dug out from beneath his thumbnail. “Do you miss our little chats?”

“I have a case—”

“Back at work so soon,” Martin sighs, “wish I’d known.” He stares critically at his nails, still and silent as a snake. He strikes just as quickly, on his feet and closing the lawn chair with a sharp snap as he pretends not to notice Malcom’s unwitting retreat. “Unfortunately, I have arts and crafts hour coming up.” Tucking the chair under his arm, he offers Malcolm a look filled with false regret. “Maybe if you come back tomorrow.”

Unwilling to be forced into yet another of Martin’s farcical attempts at pitting his children against one another for his favor, Malcolm bangs his fist twice against the door to signal Mr. David. The fresh sting of acid at the back of his throat is all wrong. It should be Martin fending off the panicked thought of becoming unimportant and easily replaced, not him.

The icy weight in the pit of his stomach only worsens with each step retraced. He has no clearer sense of Martin’s potential involvement and no one left to turn to. The crispness in the air turns to iron bands clamped about his ribs, every breath a struggle. From nowhere comes the flash of pale eyes filled with horror, and he gasps, his own eyes screwing shut. It’s a look he’s seen enough times to wish he were numb to it as much as he’s grateful he isn’t, that shock of knowledge that comes in the final few seconds of life before death.

Repulsed by it so quickly on the heels of facing his father, he still strains toward it, fights to hold on for the chance to figure out who’s begging to be saved this time, before it’s too late.

_An echoing shriek ends on a wet and muffled snap._

_He stands on a landing, mid-20th century wrought-iron spindles rising up like the bars of a cell. The light is dim, a confusing flicker beneath his feet until he realizes it isn’t the light source itself gone fitful, but something swaying in front of it. Another sound makes itself known, a slow steady swish-swish that draws him closer to the railing, peering first through the bars and then over the edge with creeping horror._

_A woman, frozen in midair, her neck bent at an unnatural angle as she rotates sluggishly in place. Her tangled brown hair fans out over her shoulders, vanishes into a pattern of black and white that swirls and merges dizzyingly with the checkerboard tiles of the floor below. He lifts a hand to steady himself and finds a bag made red by design or by blood in his grip. Like a drop in a still pond, a ripple spreads out from it, turns the world and the woman to a swirling blur of color._

_The firm hand of reality closes about his neck, drags him up and up and up no matter how hard he kicks, how hard he struggles and tries to cry out. The flash of a silver keychain catches his eye as the vision grows fragile. It contorts in on itself, the keychain’s shape shifting from one blink to the next until, by chance, the two letters in stylized cursive are painfully clear._

_RB_

The future eludes him, slippery as an eel, receding back into oily blackness. Malcolm sinks to the steps, unsure if the knot in his throat he struggles to swallow is a scream or a sob. It doesn’t even matter, he thinks as he stares at his hand and the endless trembling of his fingers. They blur together, as indistinct as his visions, until he clenches his fist so tightly his nails bite deep into his palm. If only it were that easy to wipe away the fog in his head. Someone is going to die, and there’s nothing he can do to make the images clearer, no one he can go to for help.

Not Gil, who might show up to work acting as if he’s all right but obviously in no condition to handle Malcolm falling apart all over him again. Not JT, who might have warmed to him but not so much to be in any way equipped to deal with him like this, and not Dani—

Dani, her hand solid and warm in his. The brush of her hair as soft as her voice as she pulled him free from the night terrors, the steel in her eyes no less strong for the shadow of a plea in them when she left the decision to take his meds or not entirely up to him.

He’s wanted so badly to tell her the truth. What is there for him to lose that could be worth someone’s life?


	9. If We Have to Fall, We'll Fall Together

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Related track: [Fall Together by The Temper Trap](https://youtu.be/oop2g5p1lIs) (YouTube).

When a knock interrupts Dani’s attempts at journaling, she moves on autopilot, leaving her pen in the book to go to the door to tell Mrs. Washington that no, Andre hasn’t come by. The older her neighbor gets, the more frequently she gets confused about when to expect her son to visit. But it’s not Mrs. Washington and her tufts of snowy white hair standing on her mat, it’s Malcolm.

“Bright,” Dani manages. “What are you doing here?”

“Do you mind?” he asks, manners impeccable. “I wanted to talk to you and was hoping for a bit of privacy.”

“Yeah. Yeah, come in,” she says, stepping back and thanking her lucky stars that she hadn’t changed for bed and answered the door in nothing but a tank top and sleep shorts.

Leaving Bright to make himself comfortable, Dani takes the chair by the window, one leg curled under her on the lumpy cushion and her hands folded loosely over her stomach.

“Your downstairs neighbor let me in,” Bright explains, his eyes darting from one end of her apartment to the other like a panicked bird. “I think he thought I owned the place.”

“Gee, wonder why.”

Bright looks out of place perched on the edge of her couch. His four-thousand dollar suit really doesn’t go with her nana’s crochet blanket or the mismatched silkscreen pillows, or anything else in her narrow, homey living room.

He curls his lips over his teeth, looking up at the soft glow of string lights wound through the plants hanging from the ceiling then at the frayed area rug, stained and faded from years of wear though she still can’t bring herself to trash it. He drops his gaze and nervously licks his lips. “I like your apartment. It’s nice.”

After all the fights she’d had with her ex about her choices for her space, she almost snaps that she doesn’t care about his opinion. It’s not for him. But that reaction isn’t for him, either. Other than Leti and a couple other close friends, it’s been a long time since she’s had anyone in her home.

She offers a mumbled thanks, since it’s the polite thing to do, and gathers her hair back from the heat creeping along her neck. She’s not embarrassed, exactly, and doesn’t feel the need to offer hospitality as if he’s a guest, but she’s not happy about feeling off-balance in her own place. “So, ah. What’re you doing in this part of town? Looking to buy an apartment building or something?”

His lips quirk in a small, self-deprecating smile at the dig. It fades quickly, his gaze sliding away as he licks at his lips, laces his fingers together in his lap. “No. I—” he draws a full breath and drags his attention firmly back to her, releasing it slowly from between pursed lips before continuing. “I wanted to tell you the truth. All of it.”

It’s hard for her to trust that he means it after all his dodging, even harder given the cornered-animal flicker in his eyes. She pulls her other foot up onto the seat cushion, looping her arms around her knees to hug them to her chest, and tells herself she doesn’t care what he’ll read in her body language. He wasn’t ready when she was prepared to hold his hand, and now he’s practically ambushed her. “Okay. Talk.”

Her heartbeat thuds in her chest as he works up the nerve to speak. Her mind races, jumping ahead to possible scenarios, each one of them more gruesome and implausible than the last, so when Bright says the words, “I have visions of the future,” she’s so overcome with relief that he isn’t confessing to some weird psychosexual murder, she takes a minute to catch up to what he _actually_ said.

“You have visions of the future,” she repeats slowly, enunciating every word. “Like a psychic.”

“Well, no, because psychics are charlatans who use micro-expressions and the—well, the same deductive reasoning and psychology that I use as a profiler, to defraud people.”

That would be his take on it. Despite what she’s sure are his best intentions, he can get so wrapped up in himself, sometimes, that he’s convinced nothing else could compare to _his_ experience of a thing.

“My nana was psychic,” Dani says easily, taking no small amount of satisfaction in watching him wrestle with a response. She can see him trying to form an apology for lobbing a sideways insult at the same time he’s struck dumb by not being immediately laughed out of the room and left reeling at the idea that she’s perfectly willing to take it at face value.

As his mouth works silently, though, the satisfaction turns to a flush of shame. It looks like he means to follow through this time, and he doesn’t deserve her coming at him like that. She’s got to get a handle on having him in her space.

“Well,” she says, shrugging, “Nana always said she could see ghosts, anyway.”

He blinks wide eyes, that oddly boyish sincerity surfacing as he blurts, “You believe me?”

“I don’t _not_ believe you,” she says, glad she can be honest about it.

He falls back against the cushions with a gusty breath. He covers his face with his hands, rubbing circles around his eyes with his fingertips. Muffled, he says, “This is not at all how I imagined this conversation going.”

“I bet,” Dani says, wry. She swings her feet to the floor. “I’m going to make some tea. You can have some, too, while you tell me the whole story.”

His smile this time is more grateful than guarded. “I’d like that.”

In the kitchen, she does everything by rote: filling the kettle and setting it on the burner, pulling a box of tea from the basket atop the fridge, and digging two mugs out of the cupboard. She thought she’d feel relieved if they ever made it here, and instead there’s a tightness between her shoulders blades, a tingle of anticipation underwritten with dread. She’s at least a little relieved, and something else that really isn’t appropriate to explore at the moment. The longer she sits with his confession— _I have visions of the future—_ the more absurd it seems, and the more she worries that it could be true.

She hands him a mug on her way back to the chair. “I’m out of milk.”

“Probably better for my stomach, anyway,” he tells her with a squint. “That coffee the other day? Not my best idea.”

They sit there, hands wrapped around the ugliest mugs her friends had thrifted as a housewarming gift from the secondhand shops down the block. Steam rises in slow curls, scattered by their breath. She waits him out, watching as he frowns, seems to shrink in on himself.

“I had a lot of nightmares as a child,” he begins. “More than your average kid, but we wrote that off as a side-effect of all the, you know,” he says, pointing to his temple with a self-deprecatory eye roll. “A few months before my dad was arrested, I started noticing what he was doing down in the basement, found the girl in the box. Took a bit for me to realize that my particular brand of nightmares had become those of the waking variety.”

Before he’d called the cops on his own dad. She thinks about what that would’ve been like, the amount of terror needed to push him that far, the staggering amount of courage it would take to act to stop it rather than just hide. As much as she’d like to believe she was that strong at eleven, she can’t imagine anyone capable of it. But if she believes what Malcolm’s telling her, not only was he capable of it, he’d watched people die, carved to pieces or worse, repeatedly at such a young age, and come out alive and mostly sane on the other side.

“I read a lot,” he goes on, the mug balanced one-handed on his knee while he gestures, “not surprising, given how much I read now, I know, but at the time, my mother assumed it was a combination of an overactive imagination and getting my hands on too many books I shouldn’t have.”

Dani nods and sips her tea. He seems to stall there, lost in unpleasant memories, so she prods, “The nightmares... your father’s victims?”

“Presumably. I’ve forgotten, or made myself forget, a lot of it.” He sighs and rubs a thumb restlessly on cooling porcelain. “The nightmares hung around long after Gil took my dad away, but the waking visions stopped, mostly.”

“But not entirely.”

“Not entirely. I spent a long time not knowing what was real and what wasn’t, and then an even longer time convincing myself that it couldn’t be real. Except the girl in the box,” he says, voice firming. “I never questioned that. Maybe because it hadn’t been a vision at all, not that I consciously acknowledged that until recently.” He stares at the palm of his hand, gaze focused on something Dani can’t see amongst the crease of heart and head lines. “Treatment made the visions I did have less intense. Easier to ignore. But there was always just enough for me to connect what I’d see to my family, usually after the fact.”

Dani shifts, caught up in the telling of it now like she almost never is. In some ways, it feels like an interrogation when she keeps having to prompt him. Both are a confession. “Your family?”

He gnaws on his lip as he weighs his words. “Part of it, anyway. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon,” he says finally. “Though it’s more like three degrees, and instead of movies, it’s murder. You can guess how that went when I got out into the field.”

She doesn’t even try to hide a sympathetic wince.

“Yeah,” he breathes.

After a moment, she says, “So, when you told me there were outside factors in your profile for Clark,” hoping to steer his explanation away from rocky emotional ground to the practical, “you meant your visions. You caught him because you _saw_ him.”

When Malcolm nods, it’s her turn to blow out a soft breath. “That’s some Minority Report shit,” she mumbles. “To get the jump on a guy like that....”

“The problem is that what I see isn’t always actionable, or even useful,” he says, his smile weary. “Details change. I might see the same murder happen three different ways in three different places. I think maybe because the future isn’t really the future.” His brows knit together as he unconsciously leans closer, as if he’s willing her to understand. “What we think of as the future is really a just collection of possibilities, each growing more or less likely with each second on the clock ticking down. The only constant was watching people die before I could save them. So, I upped my dosage and hadn’t had one for years.”

This is how he draws her in no matter how far away he is from what she considers her type. He’s so different than any man she’s ever swiped right on. Malcolm has a depth to him, a capacity for empathy so many men lack, though the fault lies more with society than the individual.

The things that Malcolm’s gone through, from his visions to growing up a Whitly, have taught him what it means to be dehumanized. What it feels like to be victimized, reduced to the things that happened _to_ you.

She sets her mug down and asks, “What changed?”

He follows her lead, then taps his side below his ribs. The first of two knife scars he now has. _Before John Watkins and After John Watkins,_ she thinks.

“And Endicott,” she asks, “did you know he was going to die? Is that why you were there?”

“That’s pretty much all I knew. Who and where. If I’d seen more about the why or even the _how,_ maybe I could’ve figured out a way to stop it. But….” He raises his hand helplessly, lets them drop. Another name to add to the list of people he hadn’t been able to save.

That he feels the same way about Endicott as he does so many innocents says a lot, and Dani’s not sure if she agrees. She’d rather lock scumbags away, and she’s saved the life of more than one by doing her duty. But would it bother her, not being able to save one despite her best efforts? She’d like to think so.

“The past is the past,” she says, more stridently than she intends. It’s a reminder that gets her through the toughest days.

“Doesn’t make it any easier to leave behind,” he says ruefully. He massages the heel of his hand with his thumb. Outside, a truck rumbles by. “Thanks for letting me in, and for listening. This… means a lot to me.”

She moves their mugs aside and skirts the coffee table to perch on the edge. There’s not enough room, so their knees slot together like gears as she takes his hands. She thought he might feel chilled, going over all of this but he’s not; his hands are warm, and heat seeps into the leg bracketed by his. A slow-motion crackle of electricity arcs straight to the peak of her thighs.

For a split-second, she forgets entirely what she’d meant to say.

“I know it wasn’t easy opening up,” she tells him, the words so tangled up inside her they drag free with a rasp. She can’t describe the look on his face, not when there are so many emotions just as tangled as her tongue crossing it. She can’t even say she likes it—too raw, too vulnerable—but like so many other things about Malcolm that shouldn’t, it draws her in. “I just... I want you to know that I get it.”

There’s something important in the space between them. Invisible, but she can feel it.

_This is what he means. Lives are made of probabilities. Possibilities._

She glances down at their hands. One soft, reassuring squeeze and she could slip away. That space would widen, whatever in it would disappear, and they’d carry on a little closer in their friendship for it.

The notification that popped up from Co-Star this morning whispers in her ear: _Imagine what you could do if you weren’t so scared._

He knows where her mind is by the look on his face. The slightest nudge and it would be a domino fall; it’s too late to play it cool now with his hands caught in her grip, her face warming and ears gone hot, breath a fraction too fast. The words lodged in her throat are a landmine of her own making.

Whether it’s her or him or an altered gravity that tugs them together, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is the soft press of their mouths, his fingers slipping through hers to hold on to her as much as she’s holding on to him. She tastes the peppermint tea on his breath before daring to touch her tongue to his lip, the bottom one right where he’s always gnawing on it. The barest hint of a kiss, but it sends a shiver rippling through him into her.

But he doesn’t lean in or kiss her back. He’s gone still as a startled deer.

She pulls back to look Bright right in the eye, righteously annoyed at herself for reading those signals all wrong, and at him for _letting_ her when there’s no way he didn’t see it coming.

But Bright isn’t looking back at her. He’s looking straight _through_ her, the void of his pupils narrowing to pinpricks before his eyes roll back in his head and he crumples into the sofa.

_Well, fuck._


	10. We Survive or We Don't Last

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Related track: [Punches by Bryce Fox](https://youtu.be/k2GlDONQnuY) (YouTube).

The cozy warmth of Dani’s apartment crackles in the space between them. Her darting glances are obvious in intent, and still Malcolm jolts when she makes her move. All the tension hovering around them contracts, down to that one point of contact, exactly like the feel of paddles at his temples and electricity burning across his skin, into his veins, and nothing like it at all. _Her lips are so soft_ is his single asinine thought just as the universe tears itself apart, the pieces collapsing in on themselves and dragging him into the dark.

_The woman with the initials RB recoils a few steps into her apartment, checkered coat halfway off her shoulders, red bag hitting the floor, its contents exploding free to clatter across the hardwood._

_The woman with the initials RB drops her red bag onto the end table by the door as she sighs wearily. She pulls off her white jacket, leaves it hung crookedly on the pegs anchored to a distressed chunk of lumber hung on the wall. The back of her neck aches; she rubs at it halfheartedly._

_The woman with the initials RB whispers, “Oh god,” the upturned collar of a houndstooth-patterned coat hiding everything but the whites of her eyes as she stumbles up the stairs. Her hand flies to her neck._

_The cries of the woman with the initials RB turn frantic as an electrical cord encircles her throat. She wiggles her fingers between it and delicate skin, but it pulls tight, so tight, crushing her windpipe with her own knuckles. She stops thrashing but the cord only digs harder into flesh, a long, torturous moment for her a few seconds to ensure a job well done for another._

_Blank eyes stare up at him._

_Her weight vanishes from his arms, but the warmth of her skin and the brush of wild curls remains. The woman with the initials RB has vanished, replaced by the fierce press of Dani’s mouth against his. Hands gently cradle his face, and he parts his lips, welcoming the heat of her tongue as it traces along chapped flesh._

_The fierce press of Dani’s mouth against his, and he chases the taste of her. Her tongue withdraws from his lip, inviting him to lick into her mouth. Hands slip into his hair, curl into fists, and drag him closer._

_The fierce press of Dani’s mouth against his before she draws back, the pad of her thumb lingering lightly at the corner of his mouth. “Anything?” she asks, dipping her head down to kiss at his throat, running her tongue over his jugular, and—_

Malcolm jolts awake with her touch like a brand on his neck. Alone, he lies still and assesses the situation, his pounding heart slow to calm. It’s impossibly rare for him to wake somewhere other than his own bed, and the only immediate alternative that comes to mind is a hospital or some kind of institution.

Based on the soft warmth cocooning him that smells faintly of lavender, it’s neither. There’s a scatter of books and a tarot deck on the coffee table, a collection of eclectic art prints on the wall across from him, and the tendrils of a robust philodendron compete with the equally determined vines of an ivy for premium ceiling space in the bright morning light. The air is calm and cool, like a forest at dawn. Peaceful.

 _Dani’s sofa,_ he realizes and groans under his breath as the memories come tumbling back. He reluctantly pushes back the incredible softness of a crochet blanket and sits up, rolling the stiffness out of his joints. Judging by the view through the narrow window, it’s around five in the morning, that in-between hour when the streetlamps still burn but the lightening of the sky renders them useless.

 _Dani,_ he thinks again, touching his lower lip. She’d kissed him. He’d told her everything, she hadn’t kicked him out, and she’d kissed him. And in response, he’d passed out on her sofa. Fuck. He scrubs at his eyes, and the hazy image of RB’s face flashes behind them, followed by dreamlike snatches of intimacy that even now set his heart fluttering. With one hand, he feels around his scalp, imagining he must have hit his head or crashed to the floor or something, though he can’t find any wounds to speak of. _Well, something must have triggered me,_ he thinks as he groans, the beginnings of a headache making itself known at the base of his skull.

His gaze flits around then lands on the only other door in the apartment, thankfully closed. He gets up quietly, gathering up the blanket and matching the corners, carefully listening for any sign that she might be an early riser. The acid churn is creeping up from his stomach into the back of his throat by the time he sets the neat square of the folded fabric on the arm of the couch and reaches for his jacket and tie. He doesn’t know what to think of her stripping him out of them while he was out cold, so he doesn’t think of it at all except to be glad they aren’t in the same wrinkled state as his shirt.

He straightens the couch cushions in lieu of a note then shoves both hands into his hair, fisting it tight as he takes one last look around to make sure he’s got everything. Then, steps as light as a cat burglar, he creeps to the front door and into the hall.

The second he hits the stairs, he breaks into a jog.

The world feels real again as he exits into the pre-dawn quiet. Hazy snippets of the murder scene that had interrupted what he’s certain was an incredible kiss—from his fuzzy point of view, anyway; Dani probably has a different take on it—filter slowly back. He turns every detail he can recall around and around in his mind as he makes his way home, examining them from every angle and jotting down notes in his phone of anything that seems particularly salient.

After ducking into the bathroom to scrub the stale taste out of his mouth, he takes his meds, hastily swallows down a meal replacement shake, and resumes the rest of his morning routine. The stereo clicks on with ‘Life Could Be a Dream’ and the affirmation card he picks up reads: _This is just one moment in time._

“This is just one moment in time,” he repeats, staring into the middle distance.

He rolls out his yoga mat and sets the card on the floor in front of it. About twenty minutes into his practice, he stops reading it as ominous. The words echo in his mind like a mantra, and he begins to think of time in the same way he does a mindfulness exercise. Moments come and go, drifting past him. They affect him and he can affect them, but they will always pass.

He enjoys a refreshing sense of centered calm as he moves through the rest of his yoga flow, the cooldown, and a long shower at the end. He pulls out a fresh shirt and a clean suit, and the calm only cracks when he considers if it’s a reasonable hour to text Dani.

What can he possibly say? Sorry that I fainted on you, but on the upside, I have slightly more info on the person who is going to die?

God, all the ways that could’ve gone. The phantom feel of her lips on his returns, chasing away the worst of the lingering headache while the whisper of _Anything?_ tingles in his ear. The dream of Dani had the same hazy, surreality of his vision of RB, though the specifics blur now as his imagination fills in all the details of what he would’ve liked to happen. He can picture it so clearly: inviting her to slide into his lap, sinking into the cushions as his hands travel up her back and pull her close.

He eventually pushes away all the wistful daydreaming of what might have been and sends a simple message thanking her for listening to him yesterday. Clearing his head and focusing on what needs to be done to make some progress on their killer’s identity, he scrolls through his contacts to call Claremont. The instant he’s put on hold, he considers hanging up. He had learned nothing from his father last time; what does he think would change that now? The profile itself is clear enough. The man’s throat was slit while in his sound booth, the metaphor couldn’t possibly be more on the nose. And if his father really is involved, he won’t confess to the fact. Still, Malcolm has to try, if nothing else than to cross Martin Whitly off the list of options entirely.

The hold music is elevator jazz, ostensibly inoffensive and endlessly annoying. When the automated voice reminds him to stay on the line, he checks the call time: three minutes and counting.

With a sigh, he hangs up and dials Ainsley instead. He’s prepared to leave a message—like usual—but not right off the bat.

 _Is she talking to Dad right now?_ he wonders frantically as he’s kicked directly to her voicemail.

Malcolm leaves a terse request for her to call him. It’s coming up on ten o’clock, the time when she’s usually on location somewhere to tease whatever story is slotted for the midday report. Probably she’s just out with a crew, he tells himself, but the nagging sensation in the pit of his stomach won’t leave him. There is, at least, a simple way to check.

He hits the remote to lower the television into view and flips it on as he grabs some grapes out of the fridge, popping a couple in his mouth before pushing the rest of them through the bars of Sunshine’s cage. When the usual on-the-street segment comes on and it isn’t Ainsley in front of the camera, he swallows, the sweetness on his tongue turning to ash.

It doesn’t necessarily corroborate the slowly building theory that the Surgeon has decided Ainsley is his new favorite child. She’s smart enough to recognize the danger their father presents.

But so is he. Malcolm grabs his jacket.

* * *

Malcolm has at least visited often enough that the doorman at Ainsley’s building greets him by name, and asking if his sister is home gets an affirmative and an offer to call up. He shakes his head, declining in favor of surprising her, and as he takes the elevator up, a nagging voice in the back of his head reminds him that ambushing Ainsley is something Mother would do.

It’s too late anyway, and she’ll forgive him. Probably. Hopefully. He rings the bell and steps back so she can more easily see him on the camera as he waits.

He counts off the seconds it takes before the door cracks open. It’s as much of a welcome as he’s going to get, and he lets himself in as Ainsley wraps her robe more tightly around her and retreats to the living space. He glances around with a critical eye.

The shades are all still lowered, the air stale, and there’s a mass of takeout containers next to the sink. Random detritus is scattered across several surfaces in a careless trail to the bedroom, and the bedding is a chaotic rumple of a nest. No one’s been by to clean for at least three days. Ainsley’s hair looks in need of a wash.

“What do you want, Malcolm?” she asks, tucking herself into the corner of the couch.

He hesitates in the middle of the room. “Are you all right?”

Her head tips slowly in the other direction. She doesn’t roll her eyes, but he can hear it in her exasperated, “What do you think?”

“I tried calling Claremont earlier… and I tried to call you. Have you been spending more time on the phone with Dad?”

“Only because if I don’t answer, he just keeps calling. It seems like I’m the new you.” She gathers her knees closer to her body and picks at her nails. Her distress seems nothing but genuine, and yet Malcolm can’t stop watching for signs indicating otherwise. But what can he do? She’d killed a man, and he hadn’t seen it coming.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks, approaching gingerly and taking the seat beside her.

She clenches and unclenches her jaw a few times, chewing her words over. “What does he want from me? More airtime?”

He has an answer ready for that, but the immediate darkening of her expression says she doesn’t actually want a response, just someone to listen. “You could change your number.”

“If I do that, he’ll know that he’s gotten under my skin.”

“And you don’t want to give him that power.”

For Malcolm, walking away from their father ten years ago was much different. He’d been the one with the power, even if he hadn’t realized it at the time. Ainsley’s right, if she tucks tail now, Martin will only intensify his efforts, and as a public figure, there will always be people who know how to find her. Quitting has never been an option for her any more than it had been for him.

“Would you?” Ainsley asks, chin jutting stubbornly when she turns to face him. Up close, the dark half-circles digging into the soft skin under her eyes are almost cavernous. Combined with the pallor of her face, leaching color even from her lips, the stringy hair hanging in knotted twists around her face, she couldn’t look further from the ace reporter aesthetic she wears like a security blanket. There’s vulnerability, fragility even, in the woman staring back at him, and Malcolm’s struck again by the notion that he doesn’t recognize her.

His silence suffices as answer enough.

She snorts derisively, gaze sliding away from him like she can’t stand to look any longer. “Didn’t think so. Why are you really here, Malcolm? If it’s just to talk about Dad, I’m really not interested.”

Carefully, he mulls over his approach before saying, “I’m worried about you, Ains.” It’s not the whole truth, too ugly to speak out loud, but genuine enough in its own way.

That brings her attention back in a snap, the dimple between her brows deepening, shrewd eyes combing across his face, and he finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having underestimated her again. “I’d almost believe that if you hadn’t spent the first five minutes here looking my apartment over like it’s one of your crime scenes. Are you really worried about me, or do you think I’m going to get ideas from talking murder with Dad?”

When he falters, takes just this side of too long to answer, she recoils from him as if slapped. She shoves to her feet, head tipped back to cry at the ceiling, “Oh my god, you _do._ I was joking, Malcolm, what the fuck!”

“Ains,” he starts, holding up his hands palm out, placating, “it’s just—”

She whirls around, arms spread wide. “Just _what?_ Ever since Endicott, you’ve—” Her lower lip disappears behind the upper, reappearing red and raw in a familiar, anxious tic. “He tried to kill Gil and Dad, Malcolm. He was threatening to have you thrown back in prison. Who knows what he would have done to Mom. I didn’t know—honestly, what else could I—god, Malcolm! It doesn’t mean I’m turning into _Dad.”_

 _Touché,_ he thinks, barely containing a wince as he stands, hands still outstretched in a plea. “You’re right, you’re right. It wasn’t fair of me, I’m _sorry,_ Ains,” he says, angling to grab for her wrist, but as he does, she drops her arms and steps back.

Sudden silence crashes in like a wave. It fills the space between them, space already made heavy by the significance of his admission, and steadily widens until Ainsley feels miles out of reach.

With her face turned toward the far wall, she murmurs, “You should go, Malcolm.”

His tongue itches with a thousand words he wants to say, but he bites them back before they make things worse. Instead, he hangs his head and draws a shaky breath through his nose before nodding. “Right, okay.”

She doesn’t follow as he crosses the room, doesn’t even move when he pulls the door open. He turns to offer another apology with no sign that she heard him. She remains statue-still in her living room, spine ramrod straight, as he pulls the door shut. Hand on the knob, he hesitates.

The sound of the deadbolt sliding home is unmistakable.

Art by IllestRin


	11. I Could See the End Before We Began

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Related track: [Over The Edge by RIELL](https://youtu.be/j3qx0TfV-aI) (YouTube).

Still riding high on the hot irritation that struck the minute she stepped out of her bedroom this morning, Dani exits the elevator. Forget freaking her the hell out by dropping unconscious in the middle of kissing her. Forget even the roller coaster ride he’d taken her on right up until then. For Bright to slip out while she slept, to dodge her without even a single word of explanation, and to leave her goddamn door unlocked—

## Leti

####  **Today** , 11:37 AM

Dani
    I mean I wanted it you know?
    But who the fuck leaves the front door unlocked?
    Its messed up right?

**Delivered**

She scrolls back through the flood of unanswered texts. Christ, she’d forgotten how quickly uncertainty about someone she’s into turns her into a messy bitch.

Maybe it’s better not to have Leti’s opinion coloring the message she’s trying to send Bright, anyway. The woman has an uncanny knack for finding fault in anyone and everyone Dani has gotten close to since college, but even that wouldn’t be so bad if she was wrong once in a while, even if only a bit.

Dani flicks over to Bright’s message thread. What’s the right thing to say here when she’s bubbling with a mix of worry and frustration?

## Bright

####  **Tue, Jun 2** , 10:02 AM

Dani
    Where are you? Edrisas ready and weve been waiting 20 mins already

**Delivered**

You could have told me you were leaving

She rolls her eyes and deletes the second message before sending. _Little early for a guilt trip,_ she thinks, tapping her fingers against the case. She’s still struggling with the tone by the time she slides into her desk chair. Glancing away from her phone to flick her computer on, she looks back to find the little bubble of Bright typing out his own message popping up.

## Bright

####  **Tue, Jun 2** , 10:02 AM

Dani
    Where are you? Edrisas ready and weve been waiting 20 mins already

**Delivered**

Bright
    

Are you ok? You should have woken me

Again, she erases everything she’d typed and waits.

## Bright

####  **Tue, Jun 2** , 10:02 AM

Dani
    Where are you? Weve been waiting 20 mins already

**Delivered**

####  **Today** , 11:40 AM

Bright
    Sorry I left without saying anything. I didn’t want to wake you, and I’m not sure I was entirely in my right mind.

Dani
    Glad to know youre ok
    You are ok right?

**Delivered**

“Yo, Dani,” JT calls, turning his monitor, “check this out.”

Phone in hand, she rounds the desk to peer over JT’s shoulder. The new message buzz against her palm suddenly seems infinitely less important.

Unearthed from a web archive of old articles by student journalists is a photo of Ainsley Whitly, a greasy-looking young man with the initials “CF” or “CP” stitched into the front pocket of his polo, and their first victim, Lindsay Harris. It’s a candid shot of the three of them in a library study room surrounded by stacks of books. The student newspaper lies open between them, several columns circled in red.

“Ainsley and Lindsay went to school together,” Dani says, remembering the night in the hospital, Bright’s sister pale and shaking and dodging eye contact.

JT makes a thoughtful sound and taps his pen against his notepad. “Overlapped by a year. Coincidence? Maybe, but those are piling up fast. I don’t like how it looks.”

“Shit,” she mutters, and pushes a hand through her hair. “You want me to tell the boss?” JT nods. “I’m gonna keep digging, see if there’s any bad blood there.”

“You don’t think Bright—”

“Not enough to think much of anything yet,” JT says, his look pointed but not as effective with worry creasing his forehead. “What I know is, better we don’t get blindsided if this case gets away from us, eh, partner?”

All Dani can do is agree. The dead podcaster might have an entirely different MO, but with the first murder tied to Bright via a Clark copycat and now the second victim with tenuous yet undeniable ties to Ainsley, it’s a road they’ve got to go down. There’s something festering just beneath the surface here.

As she heads to Gil’s office, her phone buzzes in her hand again.

## Bright

####  **Today** , 11:49 AM

Dani
    You are ok right?

**Delivered**

Bright
    I’m okay. Skipping a few doses is going to leave me more receptive for a couple of days more, but maybe that will work to our benefit.
    Speaking of, I saw something last night. A woman, being attacked in her apartment complex, hanged from the landing by electrical wire, killer handled her purse. Saw the initials RB. Didn’t pick up any other details.

Dani
    You come up with any leads worth investigating Ill run them down

**Delivered**

A part of her hates keeping what JT found under wraps, but with Bright already worrying about his sister, clueing him in on her connection to two murders won’t do anyone any favors.

At the door to Gil’s office, she stops, the jumble of facts and thoughts tumbling around in the back of her mind slotting neatly into place. It never felt right how rattled Ainsley had been the night Endicott died, even with her brother in the hospital about to undergo investigation for murder, _again._ The official record may state “justifiable homicide,” and as much as she’s convinced Bright didn’t do it, along with all the evidence on scene to support her theory, the question remains: who did?

Gil says trust her gut; Bright says trust him. Suddenly, she’s got a plausible third option staring her right in the face, because of all the things she trusts Bright to do, protecting his family is number one. How far would he go to cover for his sister? Manufacture a crime scene? Self-inflict wounds and risk bleeding out on the floor? She would’ve said the idea was about as far-fetched as finding herself yearning to kiss him, and look how that one turned out.

The thought of Bright having to watch her haul Ainsley in is as nauseating as actually hauling him in had been, so she files it firmly away in a box labeled unfounded as she raps her knuckles on Gil’s door. One photograph and a podcast episode make for two very flimsy connection points.

After her update, Gil agrees. A few of the knots bunched up between her shoulder blades ease.

“Hey, boss,” she says, curiosity getting the better of her. “Did our boy ever fill you in on how he caught Laurence Chase Clark?”

His brows pull together. “What do you mean?”

“Just something he said the other day about what the papers left out,” she says, and waves it away. “Never ended up saying what it was, thought you might know.”

“You’ll have to ask him. Kid never tells me everything, not even when he tries.”

Dani snorts out a laugh as she slips back into the hallway. Gil hadn’t believed Bright about the girl in the box, either, and if there had been anyone Bright would share the strange truth with, she would’ve put money on it being Gil. It makes no sense that he’d trust the lieutenant with his life, but not that.

Especially when he’s entrusted it to _her._

At her desk, she shoves it all aside to deal with later. She puts in a good three hours of whittling down their leads on the podcaster case and following up with potential witnesses, then the rest of her day on a mixture of catching up with paperwork and more background research on their two major opens. By the time she logs off, her eyes are bleary and her head aches a little, right behind her ears. Before she forgets, she scribbles “electrical rope, body hanging, rb” on a sticky note and tacks it to her keyboard.

Needing to let it go, to get away from it all even if only for a few hours, she texts Leti to see if she wants to grab some dinner together. When she gets a garbled reply, she remembers the hot ticket lined up for tonight and grins. At least someone’s having fun.

She jiggles her phone in her hand. She hasn’t heard from Malcolm since that morning. Is it her turn to reach out to him now, since he beat her to it this morning? Does one interrupted kiss mean they’re at the point of random check-ins, or does being taken into his confidence on something he doesn’t even trust Gil with make her feel like she should?

Annoyed all over again, she jams the phone into her jacket pocket and heads out. She knows better than to stay cooped up in the precinct all day. Some air to clear her head and maybe a bite to eat from one of the food trucks near the plaza.

She takes the long way around, wanting to linger outside but not willing to be that one ass who disrupts the steady pace of pedestrian traffic. The sounds of the city rise in a comforting bubble of white noise.

In the plaza, when her thoughts inevitably drift back to Bright and his visions, his sister, she pulls out her phone again.


	12. Nothing Gets Me Any Higher

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **CHAPTER CONTENT WARNINGS:**  
>  \- masochism  
> \- bad BDSM etiquette  
> \- discussed rape fantasy  
> \- implied domestic abuse  
> \- sub drop
> 
> Related track: [The Mystic by Adam Jensen](https://youtu.be/rRUOGd_9orc) (YouTube).

With leads drying up and his future sight fading to what it used to be—intermittent and vague and frustrating beyond all reason—it’s getting harder to ignore that his latest sleepless nights are driven by a single terrible fear: what if the Surgeon is connected to these murders?

What if _Ainsley_ is? He can’t rule it out. Her erratic behavior and avoidance could be the simple aftermath of a traumatic event, but he knows how often traumatic events can turn a single murder into multiples, and he’s positive she’s hiding something more than calls with Dad from him.

Adjusting his meds in an attempt to harvest fresh clues is completely off the table. He made a promise to Dani, and this time, he’s determined to keep it.

Other options remain at his disposal. Stabbing himself in the back with a knife isn’t the only way he knows to trigger enough pain to summon a vision.

The changing room at the club is a touch too warm, so as he hangs his clothes in the locker, he knows the gooseflesh on his arms is born of anticipation. It’s been a few years since he’s come to a place like this. Considering all the complications that come along with it, recreational sex has been low on his list of extracurriculars for a while now.

He drifts his fingertips against his bare chest, tracing the spot beneath the O-ring of his harness, where he’d dreamed, once, of a blade piercing through him. It’d been Sophie coming at him with a katana, dripping wet and screaming, but she’s still alive, she never _drowned_ —

Those visceral nightmares and waking dreams, how many of them had been his foresight bleeding through layers of medication and denial? He doesn’t regret taking a chance with Eve, only everything that seemed to follow: nearly slicing to her pieces, not figuring out the truth sooner, helping put her in Endicott’s path. He’d been so preoccupied by what he thought was his own fate, so paranoid, rightfully or not, that he has no idea how many signs he’d missed, how many warning bells he ignored, until he saw her there—truly saw her, not just a vision of one potential future but reality shoved right in his face—ashen and waterlogged on Edrisa’s table.

Another death stamped on his conscience, added to the dozens he had failed to prevent.

He slams the locker shut, closing the door on those memories with it.

 _The past is the past,_ he reminds himself, holding Dani’s words in his mind like a talisman as he hits the floor in search of a partner. But thinking about Dani as he winds his way through the open rooms is a mistake. He brushes a finger over his lip, recalling the charge that’d passed between them, the live-wire shock as their lips met. He’s never felt anything like it.

Then again, he’s never laid himself bare like that in front of anyone without a string of letters after their name and a doctorate hanging from their wall.

Maybe she—

He cuts off the thought before it fully forms. He came here for a reason; this is the safest and easiest way to get from A to B without hurting anyone else.

As his mind clears, he profiles without thinking. There’s the usual mix of types on the sidelines, singles looking to get off, couples and throuples socializing, a scatter of submissives waiting coyly to be approached. He heads deeper into the club where the rooms are darker, smaller, and more intimate by design. Peeking into a handful of open doors, it’s regrettably easy to pinpoint the exact type of dom he’s looking for.

In a small room with black painted walls and a swing hung in the corner, he finds a couple entertaining a girl that has “newbie” written all over her.

The couple is an equally easy read. They’re married by the matching rings and lifestyle by the collar on the woman’s neck. Tall and powerfully built, dressed in worn leathers, the husband is an obvious sadist, already getting off on how nervous the young woman with them is. The wife is submissive by training, a long history of abuse twisted into making her believe it and conditioned to go along with whatever he says.

He likes to watch her have sex, but he’s not a cuckold; he prefers to see her with men who aren’t a threat to him or inserts himself into a typical lesbian fantasy. Half of the bruises on her skin aren’t from the dungeon, Malcolm guesses, and he seethes even as he puts on a smile.

“Room for one more?” Malcolm asks, putting on a façade of false confidence just to let it drain away when the man’s attention shifts. He puts a hand to his throat and dips his head to peer up through his lashes. “Is it okay to ask that? I’m new here, but I thought since the door was open....”

As the guy gives him a slow once over, Malcolm’s skin crawls. He doesn’t bother hiding his reaction, letting the dom read the quiver of his shoulders as fear, not disgust. When the man’s gaze flicks back to the real newbie, Malcolm knows there’s no question the guy will trade the young woman he’s coaxed in here for someone considered more conventionally attractive.

“What do you think, honey?” the man asks. It’s not an actual question. The way his hand slides over his wife’s shoulder is a silent signal that she’s learned to read. This is how he controls her in public, how he creates deniability.

The wife disengages from the newbie and comes over to where Malcolm is hovering in the doorway. She runs a hand down his bare chest to the waist of his leather shorts, locking eyes with him as she flips her hand around to cup his crotch. Everything about her on the surface says assertive dominance to match her husband, but the subtler signs say everything she does is attuned to his wants and needs.

“I like him,” she answers. Her shoes make her a few inches taller than Malcolm, and as she presses herself against him, she dips her head to nuzzle her lips against his ear. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

He should have come up with an alias beforehand. He racks his brain, but the first names that come to mind are the names of the people he works with, and even he knows some lines shouldn’t be crossed. “Call me Sunshine,” he blurts out.

“Oh, _Sunshine,_ I love that,” she purrs, looping her arms around one of his as she tugs him into the room proper. “Well, Sunshine, I’m Amber and this is my husband and master, Blake. You can call him Sir, though. Only his slaves get to call him Master.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Sir,” Malcolm says.

“It will be.” Blake gathers the fidgeting woman—seeming to sense the couple’s waning interest in her—close to him, stroking his hand over her throat while his gaze fixes on Malcolm. “What are you into, Sunshine?”

If he were here solely for his own need, he knows precisely what he would want. He hadn’t always approached his masochism in a healthy way, or even with much self-awareness, but back when he had regularly made his way to places like this for the ease of it all—no strings, no questions if he broke down, people who would stick around until the horror faded and he could remember the pleasure again—it’d been easy enough to lose himself for a few hours. Tonight, though, isn’t about the buzzing pleasure of servicing someone or the endorphins that come from the kiss of a crop. He needs to be taken to the limit, to make himself vulnerable.

“Does Sir like to roleplay?” he answers, voice cracking with fabricated nerves, like he isn’t sure how the suggestion might be taken.

Blake arches an eyebrow. “Depends on what we’re talking about.”

Malcolm’s gaze flicks to the heavy chains piled on a shelf beside a slew of other free-to-use restraints. “Abduction scenarios?” he whispers, not needing to play up the way his throat tightens around the words.

The newbie Blake is idly fondling goes stiff, but he doesn’t notice or more likely doesn’t care. “Abduction scenarios,” he repeats. “Are we talking home invasion, duct-taped-and-thrown-in-the-trunk-of-a-car kinda stuff?”

Malcolm nods. “You knock me out with a gun, duct tape me when you take me, and I wake up chained in a dungeon. It’s a secret room under your house that only you and my—you and your wife know about.” He doesn’t even need to tailor the idea to make it attractive to Blake.

The man’s tongue rolls out over his lip, the hint of a smile flirting on his mouth. He runs his hands up and down the arms of the girl he’d been intending to play with, not ready to let her go. He prefers women, that much is clear, but he’s already aroused by the idea Malcolm’s presented him with, and the difference in their height and build is likely boosting his sense of power. “That’s dark stuff, Sunshine,” he says, false concern in his voice as he prods at Malcolm’s constitution like a bruise.

“I have nightmares about being kidnapped sometimes,” he admits. “But I can’t stop thinking about it—what it would be like to be trapped like that and entirely at someone’s mercy.... If Sir would even _be_ merciful.”

A thoughtful hum rumbles in Blake’s chest. His hands tighten reflexively, and the girl in his arms looks increasingly uncomfortable. She’d probably been looking to get roughed up a little and put in her place, but the covetous way Blake’s touching her sets off some warning bells. Good, Malcolm thinks, and counts down the seconds until her discomfort grows unbearable.

 _“Too_ dark, Sir?” Malcolm asks.

At Blake’s low chuckle, the girl squirms free. “Too dark for me,” she mutters, and only Amber watches as she hastily exits.

“I didn’t mean to break up the party.” Malcolm runs a tentative hand through his hair, lets Blake get a good look at the tremble in his fingers. If he can’t save RB’s life, he’ll at least have saved that girl from a damaging mistake.

“Amber, honey, close the door. I think we’ve found our third.”

* * *

Outside, dressed again in his suit and overcoat, if a bit more disheveled and less buttoned than when he’d arrived, Malcolm gulps down great lungfuls of fresh air. Boneless and swollen like sausages after being clenched into fists for so long, his fingers fumble unsuccessfully in his pocket for his phone. The more recent scar on his back blazes with pain, the one near his ribs an insistent throb refusing to be forgotten. His path along the sidewalk weaves, tumultuous and unsteady, until he collides with a brick wall of a man walking the opposite direction, arm-in-arm with a woman half his size. He turns to apologize, and—

_—a veritable horde of faceless bodies scoot and shift around him, shimmering like a mirage as they disappear from the corner of his eye. He can’t feel his feet or the swing of his legs propelling him forward, dragged along like a marionette. He trails after a woman strolling a few feet ahead, just out of reach, the outline of her clear in contrast to the ambiguity of all the others. The black and white smears on her torso seamlessly change from a swirl to checkerboard to plaid and back, drawing his eye and holding it captive as the surrounding chaos melts away._

_With every inch he closes between himself and the woman, the world seems to solidify, bringing with it the sour stench of garbage awaiting pickup on the curb. The woman’s patterned coat settles to a tight houndstooth, the brown haze around her head to perfectly formed curls._

_She’s talking, he realizes, but not to him. She disappears into a narrow door, an entrance tucked beside a warmly glowing storefront, but any lettering or numbers he sees melts before he can read them. She’s ignoring the first floor doors and going to the stairwell, her attention never once wavering from the device in her hands. A red designer bag slips to the crook of her elbow as she begins her ascent, “RB” glinting silver beneath the glow of incandescent lights from where it dangles from the strap. He reaches one gloved hand out toward it, the other withdrawing a length of electrical cord from his pocket, and—_

“Fuck,” he hisses, retracting his hand as the couple stare warily at the place it just occupied. The urge to flee spikes, and he turns without a word to hurry back up the street, finally yanking his phone free of his coat. He paws at the screen, mumbling, “Get it together,” under his breath, eventually giving up and asking Siri to dial Dani for him.

He huddles down into his coat. The evening isn’t cold, per se, but aftercare from the likes of Blake and Amber consisted of a little pat on the head, a patronizing ‘good boy’, and—

_—blood follows the knife up, both hovering in the air by his face until he angles his hand and bids gravity wrench them back down. Cartilage cracks beneath stainless steel. When he rips the blade free again, a rattling wheeze draws his attention higher, to a blurry mouth splattered red. It shouldn’t feel good, relishing the painful final breaths, but he can’t bring himself to mourn a man like Blake—_

_In a blink, the details rearrange. Blake’s Cheshire grin warps, his beard growing into an unruly tangle around lips that twist around an ugly smirk. “I always knew you had it in you, Little Malcolm.”_

_Malcolm lets out a wild cry, gripping the knife tight, ready to plunge it into Watkins—_

—and he stops, poised to slam his phone down into the concrete.

Above the jittery hum living in his skin, he can still feel the warmth of blood on his hands.

The dim and distant ring of his phone makes itself known. He lifts it to his ear, turning in a tight wobbly circle while his brain jumps ahead to what he’ll do if Dani doesn’t answer. It never occurred to him she might not, but still it rings and rings and rings. He’s only ever relied on Gil to be there for him like this when he can’t see up from down. This isn’t fair to her. He should just—

“Bright?”

“Thank god,” he blurts, fighting to control his chattering teeth. “I wasn’t sure you’d answer. Listen, I saw more. RB, whoever she is, I know the method our killer is likely to use. He’ll follow her home, somewhere with a lot of foot-traffic and stairs.”

Fuck, that’s half the city. He squeezes his eyes shut as he tries to force his frazzled mind to focus. Block letters above a stretch of sidewalk—no, a subway platform, he realizes as little details filter in. A thick yellow line to his right, the mosaic of tile on his left marking—“Bleecker Street Station. Listen, you need to get eyes on scene as soon as possible. Houndstooth coat, I think. She can’t be that hard to track down.”

“I can do that,” Dani says, her voice wonderfully calm, “as soon as you tell me how I’m supposed to sell it to the boss.”

“Anonymous tip.” Malcolm squeezes his eyes shut against the blaring headlights of an oncoming car. His strategy will hold about as well as hearing a cry for help when the warrant hasn’t come through yet, but Dani will make it work. He’s sure of it.

What could he do if she doesn’t?

“Bright, are you running?”

“What, no. I—“

A short, angry breath crackles through the phone. “What happened to telling me the truth?”

Sagging against a graffitied brick wall, Malcolm tries to concentrate. He’s so cold. The aches and pains riddling his body should be a pleasant reminder, and instead it feels more like someone dragged him across a grater, left him mottled and missing chunks of himself, his skin peeled away in patches to reveal his haphazard insides.

“Call a car right now,” Dani says. “Or I swear to god, I’ll come get you myself.”

Malcolm lets out a startled, ragged laugh. “Do I sound that bad?”

“You know what? Never mind,” she says. Spring-loaded metal bands snap around Malcolm’s chest. He doesn’t want her to hang up, which means she had better hang up so he has no choice. Not having to worry about how he’ll get home is a decent side-benefit to not having a car in the city and his mother insisting on him using her service. “Tell me where you are.”

How badly he’s judged his condition is evident when he rattles off the cross streets without protest. He appreciates the growing closeness between them, and doesn’t want to take advantage of it no matter how much he treasures talking with her, being with her. But then, he thinks, this is exactly the situation when friends call on friends. He snorts. Almost exactly, anyway.

He catches the sound of jingling keys from very far away. “And promise me you’ll be there,” Dani’s saying.

“Cross my heart,” he says, thankful the call cuts off before he can hope to die.

* * *

Of all the details he could fixate on, sitting here in the dark of Dani’s car clutching a paper to-go cup of herbal tea, the one his mind latches on to is that it smells nice. Personal cars frequently don’t. Well-maintained ones smell like Windex and polish. Car owners who don’t care one way or those who have vehicles that smell like nothing much at all. Others reek of cigarette smoke or body odor or wet animals or some nightmarish combination of the three.

Dani’s reminds him of her apartment. Clean—but not excessively so—and comfortable, lived-in with a few belongings here and there, and though Dani herself doesn’t, it smells a little like lavender.

“So... you keep a car,” he says.

“My cousin moved to Scranton with her husband a couple years ago. She was pretty much my best friend growing up, but the train only goes twice a day. And you know how it is,” she finishes with a shrug. “Even when you’re not on call, you’re on call.”

He smiles gently to himself. Lifting the cup only makes the muscles in his arms tremble again, so he keeps it propped in his lap. He’s past the worst of the shivers, a comfortable numbness settling in around him like fog. Parked where they are near the river, the city lights ripple over the blackness of the water.

“Great place to get rid of a body,” he remarks.

“Funny you should say that. Back when I was new to patrol, my partner and I got called out here on a report of shots fired. My first time seeing someone get pulled from the water. Lead detective in charge of the scene took a shine to me. Told me I ought to think about my future and ended up fast-tracking me into Narcotics.”

“So, that’s how you ended up in Major Crimes before thirty.”

“That detective still liked something about me,” she says, her smile small, shadowy and almost indecipherable in the dark but fond, wry, “considering he’s my boss now.”

He taps his fingers against the cup. “There’s a life lesson in here for me somewhere, isn’t there?”

“Not really.” Dani’s palm slides across the leatherette of the steering wheel, brushing away invisible dust, and Malcolm has to look away as he imagines the ghost of the touch mirrored on his skin. He aches for it, yearning to lean towards her, beg with a whisper for her to slip those cool fingers beneath his chin and kiss him again, let him have a taste of something sweet and leach the greasy bitterness from his mouth. His hands shake so hard he needs to set the tea into the cupholder to get them under control.

From the corner of his eye, he sees a frown etch itself into the lines on her forehead, the pursing of her lips. She twists in the seat, suddenly stricken, and gathers up his hand in hers. “Fuck, Malcolm, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought you here. I didn’t even think about—”

_“About what?” he asks, wracking his brain for what misstep she thinks she’s made._

_“About—” The blare of a ship’s horn drowns him out, pulls his attention back to the water, dark as oil._

Malcolm shakes his head and blinks his eyes back into focus. “About Eve?” he asks, the blare of a ship’s horn fading in the distance. A bitter whisper of a laugh escapes him. The truth is, he hadn’t, either.

Before he has a chance to feel guilty, the world slips sideways, vibrates as the future stretches around them. He’s— _back in that swirl of the crowd again, trailing through the rush hour stampede up the stairs with the departing train howling beneath him._

“Hey, focus,” he hears Dani say.

_He turns towards the sound of her voice. Turns and sees the sign hanging above the metro entrance. Twists around again and catches that houndstooth coat heading briskly towards—_

“Bowery,” he says, shooting up and back, whipping his head to the side to meet Dani’s startled gaze. He has to hold himself back from lurching toward her, hands quaking as he buries them under his thighs to keep still. “She exited at Bleecker and Lafayette and headed towards Bowery. I didn’t see much of the outside, but the inside of her complex was nice, one of those renovated walk-ups, and there was a storefront nearby, a boutique maybe. There are bound to be a few buildings to canvass, but I think—”

“Bright,” Dani cuts in, releasing his hand to hold up her own. “I will talk to Gil and see what we can do. Promise,” she adds when he deflates, frowning at him but not unkindly. “In the meantime, I’m taking you home. Face it, you look like shit, and you shouldn’t be anywhere within a hundred feet of this case right now. Just get some sleep, and I’ll call you with an update in the morning, okay?”

Some part of Malcolm rears up at that, fixed to protest, but he pauses at the expression on her face. Despite it all, the bruises on his neck and the rumpled state of his clothes and the fact that he called her out of the blue, out of breath and worked halfway into a panic attack, she doesn’t doubt a word that just spewed from his over-eager mouth. She’s trusting him on this, and it’s the least he can do to return the favor. So, he flops back into the seat, lets out the tension caged in his lungs on a sigh, and wonders if it wouldn’t be overstepping if he asked her to help him upstairs and get him strapped in safely before she leaves.

With a faint, hopeful smile, he whispers, “Okay.”


	13. Let the Things That I Tell You Survive

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Related track: [Lights On by fka twigs](https://youtu.be/CZiY7C-FMfo) (YouTube).

Dani, her attention on the body hanging in the stairwell as Edrisa and a pair of techs prepare to cut it down, doesn’t register the quick scuffle of feet on the stoop as anything important until Bright bursts through the propped-open door. “You had a unit sitting outside around the clock. What happened?”

“Altercation at the bar on the corner got a little heated,” Gil says, glancing from Bright to the car pulling away from the curb. “Officers went to break it up. Just bad timing, kid. Whoever did this was in and out in a flash.”

Bright visibly chokes down his frustration. They had an address, a description of the victim, and plenty of notice thanks to him, yet Rebecca Brown is dead, regardless. In his shoes, Dani would be pissed off, too. The only reason she’s not red in the face with it is she’s used to showing up after the fact.

Turning in a tight circle, Bright takes in the scene. It’s a four-floor walk-up, the staircase tight and twisting, and almost word-for-word what he had told her. An electrical cord looped around the victim’s neck and secured to the wrought-iron railing lining the second floor landing, the woman in a cream and black houndstooth coat, one of her matching cream heels on the floor and the other clinging precariously to her toes.

Bright scrubs a hand across his mouth. “How long before someone found her?”

Gil sighs and leans more heavily on his cane. “Another resident came in about four hours after the unis left their post. Soon as the officers heard the screaming, they called it in and secured the scene. Witness confirms she didn’t touch the body. Nobody in or out but the killer and anyone else who might’ve come through in the fifteen minute window the door was unmonitored.”

“This makes three,” Dani says, hooking her thumbs into her pockets.

“You’ve verified it’s connected to the other two cases?” Bright asks, pushing a hand into his hair.

They both know he already suspected it would. “Scene sounded familiar, so I ran the specifics. Guess whose debut on-air story featured a woman stalked and strangled by her ex, and found hanging from a stairwell with an electrical cord around her neck?” That she ran the details days ago from the first batch of information he handed over doesn’t matter.

Bright’s face goes sickly white. “Shit.”

“That first crime scene might have been taunting you, but your sister knew all three victims,” Dani says apologetically. “That’s too much coincidence to overlook.”

“Knew them how?”

“A restraining order against Marcus Lee—”

“That was my mother’s idea,” Bright jumps in. He winces immediately after and gestures for Dani to go on.

“A restraining order against Marcus Lee, our second victim. First victim, Lindsay Harris, attended the same school, and they worked together on the school paper. Rumor has it there was some tension there. Rebecca Brown,” she gestures toward the body being carefully lowered, “was a producer for Channel 2. Ainsley’s number is in her call history, and we found a pretty rude email on the company server from her to Ainsley about an old internship position.”

Bright rubs at his mouth, thinking furiously. “If Ainsley went around murdering everyone who said no to her, she’d have wiped out half the industry by now. No, this has to be my father’s doing.”

“How?” Pinning this on Bright’s father would be far preferable to his sister. Given Dr. Whitly’s reach, it’s not even all that implausible, but they need something concrete to justify the suspicion. “I pulled his phone records and visitor logs. I cleared his consults. There’s zero trace he’s been in contact with anyone on the outside except you and her.”

Dani can’t keep the strain from leaking into her voice, though she does her best to bury it in grim determination. Even if Bright doesn’t realize it, that’s what he needs from her now. He’ll need her sympathy later. “We have to follow the evidence.”

Bright waves an agitated hand at the body. “Rebecca isn’t slight. Her attacker had to be strong enough to heave her over the railing without help. Ainsley’s not weak, but she isn’t that strong, either. Whoever is bankrolling my father had a _skylight_ installed in his cell. Someone with that kind of money could easily supply an illegal phone, or even manipulate the server data for Rebecca’s.”

A wariness with its roots in blood-soaked carpet weighs heavily on Dani’s shoulders. “So, your dad can hire a hitman from behind bars, but it’s impossible to even consider that your sister could, too?”

The edge in her voice takes them both aback. It isn’t because of his stubborn insistence at pointing the finger at Dr. Whitly for these murders, or even that she’s almost certain he’s still hiding something regardless of what he claims.

She’s genuinely upset about last night, how broken he had seemed from whatever the hell he’d done to get them this lead, never mind how monumentally unfair it is for random chance to render it pointless. Somehow, she knows he’s operating on the same stupid belief that it’s worth it the way she did when she royally messed up undercover, but she doesn’t know how to get through to him that pushing himself to the limit won’t help anyone. When someone finally laid it out for her, she was so sure she was doing the right thing that she didn’t even try to listen.

And Bright will react exactly the same.

Before either of them can speak again, Gil’s hand comes down on Bright’s shoulder and effectively shuts them both up. “Listen, kid,” he says, his voice soft and serious. “I don’t like it, either, same as I didn’t like it when Endicott had all the evidence pointed at you. So, take a breather. Think about whether staying on this case is the best move. Not what you want,” he stresses, “or what you think you need. What the case does.”

Bright won’t back down unless he’s ordered to, and even then, he’ll worm his way back in however he can or straight up work it from the outside, stubborn and too sure of himself to think to question it.

Dani shoves her notepad away and heaves a sigh. “We need to go through the victim’s apartment and interview friends and coworkers. There’s a lot we don’t know here. Then, we comb through what we have for anything else that might connect all three murders. It could be Ainsley is only tangentially involved,” she glances pointedly at Bright. “Six degrees of Martin Whitly.”

She’s not so sure she buys it, but it’s a scrap of hope and enough to get Bright to ease up. “You’re right,” he says, visibly gathering himself together. “Of course, you’re right.”

Gil gives him a fond pat to the back and Dani a measured glance. “I’ll hold the fort here and get the unis started on the neighbors.”

Dani follows as Bright heads upstairs. She tips her head in acknowledgement to Gil’s look and the request to keep an eye on Bright she finds in it. Not too long ago, she would’ve gotten her back up about it, even if she thought she understood Gil’s concern and recognized the annoying reality of his pet genius needing to be wrangled. What ticked her off was how often he laid the responsibility of it at her feet, as if her job as a detective came secondary to babysitting a grown man.

But she gets it now. Gil hadn’t pawned Bright off on her; he trusts her with his family. She’s got no choice but to respect the amount of faith he has in her, and she wonders sometimes if she’ll ever have the strength it takes to put her faith in someone the same way.

Bright’s inside information might rule out a lot of the usual crime scene questions, but it would be a mistake to overlook them entirely. Had the victim not noticed her attacker at all, or had she written him off as unimportant until it was too late? Regardless of if he’d been lying in wait or tailing her up the stairs, why not take her at the door, kill her in the relative privacy of her apartment? Anyone could’ve passed through the lobby and caught him right in the middle of murder.

The spectacle was the point and worth the risk. If it's the same perpetrator, he’s escalating.

“We found her phone here against the wall,” Dani says, gesturing at an evidence flag jabbed into the carpet two steps down from the second floor. “She was talking to her mother.”

“I’m surprised there’s service in here,” Bright responds distractedly, ogling the disrupted patch of dust on the floor where the phone had landed, comparing the reality of murder to the vague memory of it.

“Wi-Fi boost. Building was renovated.”

“Did she hear anything?”

“Nothing helpful. She reported her daughter sounding surprised, then she heard a scuffle before the call dropped.” Dani looks up at the cord still wrapped around the railing. “Poor woman. Imagine being told you heard someone strangling your daughter to death when you thought the cat had just got out again.”

Bright hangs his head, his smile gentle and sad. It stirs up something uncomfortable in Dani’s chest, an edgy sort of regret, like a rustling in the bushes, unseen and unknown but undeniable all the same. She crams her fists deeper into the pockets of her jacket. Bright doesn’t have to imagine a lot of things.

The uniform posted outside the door nods and steps aside to let them pass. Dani arrows in on JT’s domain: mail, paperwork, datebook, anything that could give a sense of a shaky financial situation or relationship gone sour. It’s amazing how many people will write down things they’d never dream of saying aloud.

Bright sticks with his usual wide-focus view, moving to the middle of the room to take it all in and begin building a profile from the victim’s lifestyle alone.

It makes her wonder what he saw at her place. Did he take the hodge-podge of her possessions as a failed attempt at an aesthetic or understand that she fills her home with only the things she genuinely likes and doesn’t care if it fits cohesively together into a magazine’s formula for an ideal living space? Could he tell that she adores the collection of strange little succulents she picked up from a makeshift farmer’s market, but that every single plant she owns only thrives because Leti is the one who continually diagnoses them under- or over-watered?

To her perceptive, design-challenge eye, Rebecca Brown lived in the same perfectly manicured, stage-home world Bright does. Everything is impeccably coordinated, so it’s the work of an interior decorator or their victim could’ve made a mint with a side hustle for HGTV. There isn’t a speck of dust in the place or a single glass forgotten on the counter. More than likely, she has someone cleaning on a schedule. Dani makes a note to run that down, including the names of anyone with access to it.

“She’s controlling,” Bright declares. “Most likely a narcissist.” He flips the bedroom light on. Half of the room is mirrored, and a portrait of herself hangs above the bed.

“Definitely a narcissist,” Dani agrees.

“Which might explain why she didn’t notice her assailant. Anything not on her radar doesn’t register. She’s the type of person who walks down the street expecting everyone else to get out of her way.”

Bright eyeballs the expensive-looking, most likely custom valet positioned beside a cheval mirror. He borrows Dani’s pen and uses it to lift open the blazer hanging from it, revealing the custom tailoring meant to conceal a shoulder holster. “Did you find a gun?”

“Nothing on the scene or on her. If she had it in her purse, the killer might’ve taken it along with her wallet and keys. Techs didn’t find one in here.” Dani takes her pen back and jots down a note to check permits and request a second sweep of the victim’s home and office, just in case. “A pro wouldn’t bother with a registered weapon without a good reason.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Bright says, coming to stand beside her, close enough she can feel his warmth.

She can’t tell if the proximity is by accident or design.

“If we’re looking for someone hired to do the job,” Bright goes on, “I doubt they’d try to move a registered weapon, and keeping it is a liability. Most likely they mean to use it, since a gun registered to a dead woman is excellent cover.”

Dani pinches the bridge of her nose. “You, me, JT, and the boss, first thing tomorrow morning. We go over every last scrap and find what we missed.”

He shoots her a startled look. _That’s right,_ she thinks, _you heard me._ What they missed, not if.

It might be time for some of that sympathy already.

“You know I don’t _want_ it to be your sister.”

“I—” he says, flushing darkly. “Look, I—”

“Nope,” Dani says easily. _“You_ look, Bright. I know about Endicott.”

Malcolm’s mouth works soundlessly. She can practically see the excuses taking form behind his eyes, but she’s done with that. He screwed up the courage to tell her his big, dark secret, the one even Gil doesn’t have a clue about. He relied on her to help piece him back together last night, and though he might not have needed it if he’d reached out before instead of after, it doesn’t change the fact that he’s genuinely trying.

Returning the favor—and his trust—isn’t the least she can do, but it’s damn close.

“I don’t know everything,” Dani explains. It isn’t her who should be at the edge of panic here, but her heart hasn’t gotten the memo. “Hell, I don’t _know_ much at all, not for sure. There’s no evidence, so nothing I’m compelled to bring to the brass. But here’s the real kick in the ass: I don’t care.”

“You don’t care,” Malcolm echoes, dumbfounded. He shakes his head like a dog shaking off water. “About _what?”_

He’s so close to her, staring at her so intently as he tries to read her face and plan his next move. She’s not playing the game this time, though, so when she looks into his eyes, all she sees is beautiful shocking blue.

“I’m a detective, and you’re not a killer. As far as I’m concerned that case—your case—is closed,” she says wryly. She’s never seen him so like a fish out of water, and she’s not so high-minded that she can’t enjoy it. “All I care about is what’s happening right now.”

“The past is the past?” Malcolm challenges, but she can see the flicker of hope.

She didn’t come around to the decision as easily as she’s laying it out for him, and maybe if she clued him in to all the doubt and second-guessing, he’d be more likely to believe her. It really was a kick in the ass when she realized she wasn’t hung up on accepting justice not-so-by-the-book; she was hung up on accepting _herself_ as someone who could.

“You asked me to trust you,” Dani says and shrugs. “This is what me trusting you looks like.”

Malcolm couldn’t have looked more stunned if she’d yanked out her gun and pistol-whipped him with it.

“If all this,” she gestures at the apartment, meaning the scene in the stairwell, the ones across town, the whole tangled mess of it, “is pointing to your sister, let’s figure out why. If neither of us likes the answer when we find it, we’ll deal with it, because you know where I’ve got to stand. Until then, I’m standing right here with you.”

Malcolm’s eyes glisten. He drags in a shuddering breath and scrubs furiously at his face, not that it does any good. He doesn’t full on cry, which she appreciates, but he won’t—can’t—choke it all back, either. Weirdly enough, she appreciates that, too.

“So,” she says, “tomorrow morning, briefing room. Yeah?”

He nods, flush with relief and gratitude and, she hopes, not fear. She doesn’t have Bright all figured out by any stretch, but she knows exactly how he feels about family.

She also knows there’s no way he’s going to wait until tomorrow morning to review the evidence. But if he’s not heading home for sleep, then better he dive back into his case notes than another situation like the one that earned him all those bruises.


	14. Cause All We Are is Bled and Gone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Related track: [Cave by Future Islands](https://youtu.be/RGrhubD8VDg) (YouTube).

Malcolm had all the best intentions of a good night’s sleep, though granted his scale is a little more skewed than most. He buckled up and settled down, and somehow still spent half the night shuffling around his notes from the Harris and Lee cases, writing up Brown’s, then shuffling the whole thing around again.

When the team joins him in the situation room with their first cups of coffee, Malcolm’s at the bottom of his third. He wheels out the board and launches into a recap before JT’s even in his seat.

“Let’s go over what we know. Victim number one, Lindsay Harris. She went to the Columbia School of Journalism—with my sister Ainsley,” he adds with an acknowledging nod towards Dani. “By reports they didn’t get along, and she had plenty of enemies around the music scene, but none with any significant motive. Lindsay was killed and posed port-mortem using the same methods as Laurence Chase Clark, the serial killer I encountered on one of my first cases as a field agent. Based on the angle of the blow, her attacker was likely male, and of average height.

“There were no signs of forced entry,” Malcolm goes on, “but no record of her expecting any visitors, either. Still, she may have known our killer and we know he tased her, so it’s possible she was incapacitated when he struck the killing blow.”

“Defensive wounds suggest she fought back,” JT adds. “Taking her out that way may not have been his first choice. And we found two drops of blood at the scene that didn’t match the victim.”

“Right,” Malcolm says, clasping his hands together excitedly as he jumps on that thread. “She had no tissue under her nails, and no additional fibers or blood found in her hair. So, if we assume she got a hit in, it’s possible she had a weapon. But there was nothing obviously out of place, which means the killer either tidied up, or—”

Gil crosses his arms over his chest. “Took it with him. At the scene, you asked about a knife. You’re thinking we need to take a second look at what she kept in her kitchen.”

“Already ahead of you.” Malcolm takes out his phone and pulls up the victim’s Instagram account. The detectives lean in as he places it in the center of the table. “Here’s a video taken about eight days before she was killed.”

About halfway through the five-minute promo for one of her new songs, Malcolm slides a photo from the crime scene board onto the table. “What’s missing?”

Gil spots it first, probably because he’d been using the same shelf as an armrest. “The trophy.”

“She could’ve gotten rid of it,” JT says.

“She’s kept it since high school,” Dani points out. “Why get rid of it now?”

Corners of his mouth turned down, JT bobs his head. “Fair.”

“Onto our second victim, Marcus Lee,” Malcolm says. “Again, plenty of enemies, but none with a strong motive. Some overlap with the first victim because the music industry is fairly tight-knit, and again, a loose connection to me and my sister by way of a podcast episode. His connection to Ainsley is a little stronger via an old restraining order.” Malcolm points to the relevant notes pinned to the board. “Unlike our first scene, the killer wasn’t in-and-out. We have all the identifiers of a rage killing or a sadist, leaving us with a heavily mutilated corpse.”

“There was a helluva lot of blood,” JT says, “and he still got out without tracking evidence through the rest of the house.” He drums his fingers against the table. “He’s not entirely disorganized.”

“If these are connected, he is the only male victim,” Dani adds. “That could mean something.”

“Sadistic, disciplined,” Malcolm summarizes, ticking each item off on his fingers, “possessing a potential psychosexual or revenge-based fantasy towards men. A possible past history of abuse, or—”

Gil exhales softly. He takes a sip of coffee before gesturing with the mug. “Skip to the part where you tell us what you think is missing from the scene, kid.”

“Three months ago, Marcus received a county acknowledgement for his coverage and support of youth sports. There’s a small column about it and a photo in a neighborhood newsletter.” Scrambling for his phone, Malcolm pulls up the relevant article where Marcus Lee proudly shows off his name engraved in brass. “He has every plaque, certificate, letter of recognition, and newsbyte he’s ever gotten up on the walls, but not this one? There’s an empty nail beneath the On Air sign, so I bet it was hanging there and that’s what the killer took.”

“So we have two victims full of themselves,” Dani begins, “a third with a definite ego, but she had a gun stolen, not a trophy or award.” Brows raised, she drinks her coffee and peers at Malcolm over the rim.

“True,” Malcolm says excitedly, rounding on Dani with a pointed finger. _“But_ despite taking her keys, the killer didn’t access her apartment. If he has the discipline to follow orders and stage our first two murders, then he took what was readily available. At the heart of things, trophies and awards are symbols of power, status. A gun can easily represent both.”

JT clears his throat, a frown deepening the lines on his face. “You know, I hate to say it, but if we’re talking corpses tied to you and your sister, that second one isn’t too far off from the way Dani found Endicott. Slashed throat and stab-happy. We still don’t know if there was someone else in the house after Endicott knocked you out.”

Malcolm freezes like JT’s dumped a bucket of ice water over his head. How could he have overlooked something so obvious? Zero hesitation in the stab wounds of both cases. Clear overkill, either sadistic or rage-driven, and aside from the area immediately surrounding the murder itself, no evidence tracked through the scene.

Dani hides her reaction better, shifting in her chair to stretch an arm out over the table, turn the few photos scattered on it to face her. The rest of the team has no way of knowing how much weight JT just added to Malcolm’s theory about the Surgeon’s involvement.

“Where do we go from here?” Gil asks. “You said it yourself, if we operate under the assumption that we’re looking for a suspect with a grudge against you or your sister….” With a dry chuckle, he gestures at the city sprawling outside the windows.

Malcolm sighs. “I need to talk to my father. I need to know what he knows.”

“Do you want me to go with you?” Dani asks.

“Actually, I think Gil,” Malcolm says, noting the surprise that blossoms and is quickly hidden on Dani’s face. It’s not that he doesn’t want her there. In fact, having her at his side would probably make the entire ordeal far more tolerable. But if he’s going to get anything out of this, he needs to throw Martin off balance. “He _loathes_ you.”

Gil’s face twists like he’s suddenly smelled something foul. “The feeling’s mutual.”

“And it might be just what I need to get him to stop ignoring me.”

Dani doesn’t seem especially thrilled about stepping foot in Martin Whitly’s cell again, and yet she says, “How about we both come along? If you really think he’s behind all of this, Bright, then a phone might not be the only contraband he has hidden away. I’ll drive _and_ be backup.”

* * *

“Malcolm, my boy, what—” Martin’s gleeful welcome withers as Gil follows Malcolm into the cell. His expression turns stormy. “What is he doing here?”

“I heard you got some upgrades,” Gil says, poking at the ostentatious rug with the tip of his cane. “Wanted to see them with my own eyes.”

“Well, I would give you the grand tour, but judging by your labored breathing, you should’ve accepted the courtesy wheelchair at the front desk,” Martin replies, gaze narrowing in on the area where Gil had been stabbed. “You keep putting your body under unnecessary strain, Lieutenant Arroyo, and you’ll end up right back in the operating room.”

“Enough. Dr. Whitly,” Malcolm says. He draws in a deep breath as if it’s difficult to go on. “I need your help.”

The deliberate emphasis on Malcolm and not the department doesn’t go unnoticed. “Are we really back to titles again, son? The last time you visited you were calling me Dad.” Martin’s gaze turns from false sadness to heavy condescension as it drifts to Gil, then just as quickly morphs into a smile as his focus swings back to Malcolm like the needle of a compass. He clasps his hands together. “Ah, stuck on that new case you mentioned, then?”

As ever, Martin is simultaneously easy to read and frustratingly opaque. Has his interest in Ainsley waned, his focus snapping back to Malcolm, or is delight shining in his eyes because he’s playing all of them? “There are three bodies now, and I believe they’re connected.” _To you,_ he thinks. _Through you to us._

“Connected? How so?”

Malcolm provides the bare minimum to catch Martin up. Nothing on his father’s face or in his demeanor suggests involvement. If anything, he seems genuinely concerned that someone might be sending a message to his children via a string of corpses.

Malcolm curls his fingers into a fist as he aches for that to be true. No matter how many times he’s hurt, he can’t help reaching for the red-hot burner with hope in his heart that this time, it’ll be different.

“Son, I know you want these killings to mean something, but thousands of people went to school with your sister. And a true crime podcaster who devoted an episode to me? Not exactly hard to find.” Martin spreads his cuffed hands in the equivalent of a shrug.

Malcolm bites back a growing buzz of irritation. He can see exactly where Martin is headed, and if he weren’t so completely certain that the visions are proof of a connection, he might’ve been swayed.

The skylight gives Martin a convenient spotlight as he cocks his head to the side and paints himself as the perfect portrait of paternal concern. “Now you have some news producer who didn’t give your sister an internship? There are only so many television stations in town, my boy. I hate to say it, but I think you’re manufacturing connections where there aren’t any.”

Before Malcolm can refine and loose any of the barbs on the tip of his tongue to attempt to shake something, _anything_ out of his father, the door behind him swings open. Utterly calm, Dani leans in and says, “Bright, we need you out here for a sec.”

He keeps Martin’s falsely pitying moue front and center as he smirks, hoping the rising pressure of boiling anger isn’t showing on his face. “Sure,” he says easily. “We’re wasting our time here, anyway. You were right about him being useless on this one.”

Triggering the Surgeon into a rage might have granted him the momentary joy of schadenfreude, but he can’t look back. He brushes past Dani and has to trust that she’s moving with him. He can’t look back and he can’t stop, because he _won’t_ give his father the satisfaction. When Mr. David’s concerns registers, he realizes that his march is as unsteady as it is determined, and he would’ve kept on going except for the firm hand that catches his wrist in the lobby.

He whirls on Dani, eyes wild, but she doesn’t recoil, doesn’t speak, doesn’t react except to tug him forward into the cradle of her arms. His heart stutters.

“I get it,” she mutters into his shoulder in that understated way of hers, the woodsy scent of her shampoo floating across his face. One of her hands curls to a fist in the fabric of his jacket, her body heat pressing in against his chest. A wave of calm washes over him, lavender-scented and warm like a handmade blanket, such warmth that—

_—bleeds through the thin fabric of his slacks, but the body under his hands grows colder with each wheezing breath._

_All he can see is gray, miles and miles of gray, broken by staccato splashes of red. His hand, dainty with its graceful lines and narrow knuckles and unmarred skin, slides through blood that reforms into small puddles in the spaces he leaves behind. The gray contorts—the gray is a prison jumpsuit and the person wearing it twists in pain, but he isn’t looking at them. His gaze is on his hands, the first red-smeared and the second only just now lowered into view from where he had held it aloft._

_The knife clutched in his fist gleams red._

_Limp fingers brush at his cheek. “And so my sweet angel flexes her claws,” John Watkins drawls, weak and gravelly, as his lips peel away from bloody teeth and the touch at his cheek—_

—is sharp, a brief sting. “Bright, can you hear me?” Dani hisses, her eyes darting back and forth between his own, desperately searching for a spark of recognition in the void.

Malcolm flinches back from a second slap, his skull connecting with a pillar hard enough to set stars flickering across his vision. Trying to shake them away only worsens the throb at the base of his skull. He holds his head and breathes until his sight clears and he can hear his own thoughts again. Blinking quickly, he looks up, offers the first words that pop into his head. “I’m fine.”

Ignoring the obvious, Dani keeps her gaze locked on his. “You saw something, didn’t you?”

His mouth drops open before his brain can catch up, a token response queued up and ready to fly. The reality that he can be honest for once in his life hasn’t sunk in yet.

Instead of the half-prepared garbage on his tongue, he gulps down a breath and says, “My sister’s going to kill John Watkins.”

Dani’s poker face finally wavers. Her eyes widen slightly, then slowly a little more, more again until they’re more white than iris. “Shit.”

She pulls away, doing a twitchy one-eighty with one hand secured on her hip and the other on her forehead. While she processes that at double time, he straightens his tie and does his best to wait. It’s a nervous tic, a dead giveaway, but it helps nonetheless, and he doesn’t have to hide it from her.

When she turns back around, brows pulled low, she fixes him with a sharp look. “You’re sure?”

Teeth worrying a hangnail, he nods, the image of Watkins’ blood-stained grin burned into his brain.

Her eyes narrow a fraction. Her voice is softer, more hesitant as she says, “But the future’s just a bunch of possibilities, right?”

With that hanging in the air, the front door opens. The sudden gust carries in a brief blare of traffic and then it falls shut, letting the click of approaching heels fill the space. It draws Dani’s attention first, and her surprised recoil draws his.

“What are you doing here?” Ainsley demands, as much an accusation as it is an attempt to cover up her discomfort at being caught.

A chill sweeps through Malcolm, skin prickling in its wake. His focus flits from the white-knuckled grip on her handbag to the nervously shuffling pointy toes of her stilettos to the stubborn set of her jaw.

Keeping his tone even, Malcolm says, “Following up on a case.” The weight of Dani’s gaze forces more urgency into his voice. “What’s your excuse?”

“We’ve done this dance before,” Ainsley says dismissively, and tosses her hair back. “I have some questions Dad agreed to answer.”

“What kind of questions?” he presses, watching as her pupils contract and her breathing speeds.

“Are you trying to interrogate me now? It’s none of your business, Malcolm.”

“It’s always my business!” Malcolm shouts, catching Ainsley by the shoulders as he makes an only somewhat effective attempt at collecting himself. “Listen to me, Ains. You need to stay away from him. He’s playing games again, and people are dying. People you know.”

She glances down at his vice-like grip, then back at his face, her frown digging deeper and deeper furrows into her skin. “What are you talking about, Malcolm? What people?”

“The calls, the special attention,” he says, pleading with her to understand. “He’s trying to manipulate you. By coming here, you’re giving him exactly what he wants. You _know_ that.”

Exasperated but still so stubbornly, blindly unconcerned, Ainsley says, “Of course I do. But what am I supposed to do? I won’t stay holed up all the time like you and Mom. I’m not going to avoid everything to do with Dad because you think he _might_ be up to something. News flash, Malcolm. That’s my job. You think he’s what, killing people I know?” She jabs a finely manicured finger into his chest. “From _jail_?”

She lets that hang, then slowly eases back. “I know a lot of people. I can’t even remember how many wakes and funerals I dropped in on last year, just out of professional courtesy. How long do you think he’s been trying to wipe out my contacts?”

Hearing her parrot nearly the same excuses as Martin, watching her laugh off people around her dying, sends him reeling. Is there anything he can say that she won’t wave immediately aside? How can he just stand here while she puts herself in harm’s way?

But then, he doesn’t really believe she’s in any, does he? Not at the hands of their suspect, and as for their father… well. Ainsley’s tried-and-true method of dealing with a setback is to ignore it. If she spots an opportunity, she’s equally liable to aim for vengeance, but that’s always been professionally or socially, never outright violence.

Maybe it’s because he accused her of hiding something. Or is trying to prove to him she can deal with their father?

The phantom weight of a blade kisses his palm. He clenches his fist.

 _What if it’s different now,_ comes the whisper in his father’s voice. _What if you missed the signs all along? Filming her boyfriend’s impromptu surgery to get the juiciest story, making mince meat of Endicott without an ounce of reticence. Maybe,_ it says with glee, _you don’t know her as well as you think you do._

“Stop looking at me like that,” she snaps, wrenching free and backing away. “Don’t look at me like I’m one of your suspects.”

Malcolm bristles. “Then you should stop acting—”

“Malcolm,” Dani says, a soft reprimand. Though it effectively shuts his mouth, the words are already out there.

Ainsley stares. “Wow,” she whispers, one low, ponderous sound heavy with a thousand things he can’t read through tears welling in her eyes and the shiny, knife-edge glint of betrayal.

“I’m going in there whether you like it or not.” Her eyes wet, she stands tall and doesn’t let the croak in her voice slow her down as she shoulder-checks Malcolm out of the way. “We can talk about your paranoia and unhealthy need to be the center of Dad’s attention some other time.”

Ainsley sweeps into the corridor with Jessica Whitly’s righteous indignation and disappears without giving either of them a second glance.

A split second later Gil appears in her place, twisted halfway round to frown back the way he came. His steps slow when he catches sight of their faces. “Everything okay here?”

Malcolm squares his shoulders, his breath mostly under control and most of the creeping numbness in his extremities pushed forcibly aside. “Sorry, Gil. I shouldn’t have left you alone in there.” _I shouldn’t have come here at all_ , he thinks, and he feels hollowed out inside, Ainsley’s hurt scraping at nerves already flayed raw. “Just… needed some air.”

Gil’s hand settles on the back of Malcolm’s neck, a welcome comfort. “It’s all right, kid. You should head home, take some time. We’ll arrange a second sweep of Marcus Lee’s house and run down the names in Rebecca Brown’s address book. We’ll also take a fresh pass at Dr. Whitly’s visitor logs to see if the physical records match what they emailed us.”

Any attempt at a protest he might make would be less than a token at this point, so he nods. “I need to walk off some of this first. Don’t worry, though. I’ll get home.

“Call me if you need anything,” Dani says, her gaze steady, and where it was once a question, an offer of just in case, now it’s stated as given: if he needs, he’ll call.

He resents the burden he is to the people who care. He hates how much he needs it and his own relief as it’s offered freely, and acknowledging that this is normal, this is what it means to care, doesn’t change how much he wishes he could be _less_ of what he is. It had been so much easier at the Bureau where he’d made enemies, not friends.

Easier, and so much harder.


	15. And in the Dark I Found You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Related track: [Sympathy (feat. Rainsford) by Twin Shadow](https://youtu.be/lTADFIsuzto) (YouTube).

Visiting Claremont leaves a bad taste in Dani’s mouth. The pile of paperwork on her desk is made barely tolerable by Leti blowing up her phone with better and better reasons to ditch.

## Leti

####  **Today** , 1:16 PM

Dani
    Im on a case

Leti
    bitch ur always on a case. im only a few blocks away and my next shoot isnt til 4.

Dani
    Anyone Id know?

**Delivered**

Leti
    no one exciting. its just a magazine spread

JT glances up from across the table, obviously curious since usually it’s _him_ glued to his phone. “New girlfriend? New… boyfriend?”

“Fuck off,” she jokes, putting her phone face down next to a stack of files bristling with sticky notes. Dr. Whitly definitely had one off-the-books visit that got scrubbed from the digital records, but aside from a swooping maybe-C the signature is near illegible. “It’s just my friend, Leti. You met her at Ronnie’s party.”

“She the built, dark girl with the buzz cut? Makeup and nails on point?”

“That’s the one.” Dani squints at the reconstructed timelines for each of their three victims. The dates and times keep blurring together, and by the third time she’s painstakingly picking them apart again, JT shoves his chair back.

“I need a break,” he announces. “Soda?”

“Machine’s tapped. Down to five rows of Tropical Sprite again.”

“Shit’s gotta be expired by now. I was thinking we’d go for a walk, anyway. Gotta grab a bite, I forgot to fix something for myself after packing Tally’s lunch.”

Perking up, she asks, “Tito’s?” hopefully, already picturing the semi-stale donut holes stashed behind the counter. She’s long since given up trying to figure out what the hell Tito does that keeps them from going dry and turns them into deliciously chewy nuggets of sugary gold. The important thing is, he’s willing to share.

“Sure.” JT pulls his jacket off the back of his chair and grabs his sunglasses. “I could go for that.”

Moving feels good, getting some distance from the case even more so. Maybe Leti’s onto something about calling it a day. Or she could run down a pending interviewee as an excuse to get out of the station until it’s time to clock out.

Her thoughts must be obvious, because halfway down the block, JT gives her a sidelong look and suggests just that.

“Now you’re looking for excuses,” Dani says and elbows him in the ribs to wipe the worry from his face.

“You’ve been wound up about something.” He swats at her arm and puts on the stern face of authority he thinks nobody sees him practice. “You know what the boss says. Tired eyes don’t see shit.”

“I think he phrases that a little differently.”

JT swings wide around a knot of tourists too caught up in their own excitement to realize they’re in the way. “Mine’s catchier.”

His grin is infectious, so she lets him have that one. The dark cloud that’s been hanging low over her head lightens, and at the corner, she gives in and texts Leti. She’s got no intentions of fucking off for the rest of the day, but they haven’t gotten together in over a week and she still hasn’t heard how Leti’s date went.

And if Leti’s gone this long without dishing details, chances are it’s hella juicy and requires a proper face-to-face.

## Leti

####  **Today** , 1:42 PM

Dani
    🥪🏃🏾 Titos? Im heading there now with my partner

**Delivered**

Leti
    if you get there first order me a falafel

Tito’s already got Leti’s falafel in the works when they get there, with Leti smack in the middle of the latest scoop on Dani’s love life.

“—picked that boy up right down the block from there, and he’s looking like he’d been run over by a truck so you know what I’m thinking—”

“Oh, he likes it freaky,” Tito agrees. Today’s apron is a rainbow gradient of different types of cats, which might’ve gotten him some flak if he didn’t look like he could bench press a train. Dani likes it, and not just on principle.

What she doesn’t like is being gossiped about, and that _is_ on principle.

“That,” Dani says frostily, “was told to you in confidence.” She never talks shop with Leti because the woman can’t keep a secret to save her life, but the thing with Bright by the river was personal. Mostly.

JT leans to whisper, “They talking about Bright?”

“I haven’t met the man,” Leti says, her fine-tipped nails glinting in the fluorescents as Tito plunks a neatly wrapped sandwich into her outstretched palm, “but what else is a rich, white boy doing there besides hanging out at the _social club?”_

One perfectly done brow writes a whole opinion piece on the subject, and she aims a pointed glance to JT’s hip where his cuffs are clipped to his belt. “Not the first cop I’ve known who likes to get those out for fun.”

“He’s not a cop,” JT says, giving Dani a half-second to be grateful that he’s got her back. Then he leans against the counter with his gossip face on. “But, dude, tell me about it. I like the guy, but he’s got some weird-ass hobbies. You know he’s got shackles on his bed.”

With little hope, Dani says, “Those are to help him sleep.”

“You’re not the one who had to go to a sex shop with him on a case,” JT counters, and Dani wonders how much _actual_ damage it could do to her pride if she buried her face in her hands and trudged back to the precinct alone and donut-less.

Looking pointedly at Tito and Leti, JT raps a knuckle atop the deli case. “Hell, first thing he consulted on, right off the bat, he says it’s this specific type of bondage rope that made the bruises we’re looking at, even identified the brand. The guy definitely knows some shit.”

And with that, Dani abandons defending Bright’s honor. It’s not as if he’s wrong, and for all he’s playing it up, he’s brimming with a weird sort of pride. That’ll come in handy the next time he gets shifty.

“I didn’t walk all the way here to speculate on whatever Malcolm Bright is or isn’t into,” Dani says. “Pony up the sugar rush.”

Wordlessly, Tito produces a small, grease-soaked bag of the coveted donut holes. Dani snatches it from him primly.

“If he isn’t into a little leather, he’s definitely into _you,_ ” Leti says.

She rolls her eyes. “Do we really need to talk about this?”

All three of them are assholes who happily answer yes in concert. Hiding a laugh, she flips them off and perches on the edge of an empty table with her snack to let them tittle-tattle like a bunch of aunties on the stoop.

The truth is, she’s a little preoccupied with Bright, too. Watching him go into that cell again to talk to his father… it’s like having to watch one of her friends go back again and again to an ex that’s just no good for them, maybe even bad news all around.

They never give their wounds a chance to heal. Always picking at the scabs, thinking this time will be different, that if they just try a little harder, bleed a little more, it’ll be worth it, when they damn well know deep down, it won’t.

Bright should be too smart to run a fool’s errand, but he cares too much about the victims. She’s seen what it’s like when people get chewed up and spit out by the job, and he’s more than halfway there.

It’s tragic, but the people who join the force solely to save people, they’re the ones who don’t last. She’s never seen one so willing as Bright to step in harm’s way in search of answers, and damn, but nobody can do any good in this world if they end up too early in the ground.

She reaches into the bag only to find it woefully empty, the dozen donut holes nothing but a sugary memory. She licks a flake of chocolate off her lip, only paying half-attention to JT relaying the whole sex shop story to the others like they’re shooting shit at a cop bar. Each time he tells it, he embellishes it a little more.

When Dani had picked Bright up the other day, she’d assumed he’d been high on something and got rolled. She’ll admit that’s her own bias. Would Bright really take himself to a sex club to get his ass whooped? Of course he would.

_I should have you slug me every night._

Dani stands up hastily, interrupting the startling tingle that tries to seize her belly. “Leti, you need a smoke?” she asks, grabbing a bottle of juice from the fridge and dropping a five on the counter.

“Always,” Leti says, peeling away from the huddle and already digging into her purse. “Let’s go, chica.”

* * *

Dani stands in her socked feet with her back against the fridge and digs her chopsticks around the leftover carton of bibimbap for the last bits of carrot. Over the years, she’s gotten better at shedding the day, putting her job in a neat little box out of necessity. Tonight, though, even after that much-needed time with Leti, she can’t seem to stop looking in the rearview.

She’s starting to understand better and better how dark a shadow Martin Whitly casts. It wasn’t hard to get a warrant for Ainsley’s finances, and for a trust fund that large to drop to six figures on the eve of Endicott’s death? That trail won’t lead them to anything good.

Just like hanging around alone and brooding in her kitchen is only going to sour her mood entirely. She tosses the carton in the trash and grabs her phone, messaging a few people and the group chat to see what folks are up to. Right now, she needs a stronger distraction than _The Bachelor_ can provide.

It’s not solely the particulars of the case, or being drawn into Malcolm’s fixation on finding some scrap of evidence to tie Dr. Whitly that she can’t shake; it’s Leti’s derisive snort and no-nonsense, “Just fuck the boy,” that keeps rattling up out of nowhere.

Like always, she can’t entirely blame the ho, not when she’s been thinking the same thing off and on. If she closes her eyes, she can summon up the brush of his mouth on hers, the ghost of his body in her arms.

A few messages trickle in as she keeps herself busy tidying up the invisible corners in her apartment. Two of them are open invites to come hang out and have beers, but if she’s honest with herself, the only couch she can picture herself on right now is tufted leather and probably costs more than an entire month’s pay.

## Bright

####  **Mon, Jun 15** , 11:49 AM

Dani
    You come up with any leads worth investigating Ill run them down

**Delivered**

You at home?

She types out the message but doesn’t hit send. Her daily Co-Star message had been “Give in to fate,” and maybe she ought to listen to it for once. _If he hasn’t gone out for the night, it’ll be a sign,_ she thinks, plunking down to pull her boots back on.

A sign pointing to what, she hasn’t decided. She still hasn’t even when she’s jogging down the steps to catch the next train.

* * *

The electric buzz, the rhythmic flicker of lights zipping by outside fingerprint-muddled glass both go largely unnoticed. Dani’s brain is busy pulling a Bright, flipping between introspective and anxious almost as quickly as the train.

At first, she can’t seem to stop switching from the memory of perfectly groomed stubble against her cheek and the shifting muscles of his back beneath her fingers, and then she wonders at the bruises peeking out from beneath his clothing the other night, especially the ones printed like inked fingerprints on his skin.

He probably hadn’t been thinking too much about what conclusions she would draw from where she picked him up. Private social club, Leti always insisted, but Dani’s fine with calling it what it is, and it doesn’t take much effort to imagine the kinds of things he could get up to in there that would leave more than a few interesting marks.

She’s not as wild as Chelsea or as use-'em-and-lose-'em as Leti, and while she’s enjoyed her fair share of sex that leaves her aching the next day, she’d never gone in for the real hard stuff. It could be Bright does.

But for it to leave him shaking and disoriented and cold as ice when he climbed gingerly into the car?

Her gut chills as another possibility slithers by. She’d marked the revelations he shared as an unintended consequence of doing whatever it is Bright does on his off time. Maybe, though...

Maybe that had always been his goal.

The longer she thinks about it, the more sense it makes. And the more sense it makes, the more tempted she is to throw hands the second she lays eyes on him. What the hell had he let someone do to him to break him down like that, render him docile and obedient and so open that it triggered a glimpse of murder instead of the floaty afterglow Chelsea talks about?

The sudden flipbook of images her mind provides of Bright on his knees, head bowed and thighs spread, isn’t where she meant to go with that. Neither is the crisp visual of a mouth sucking marks onto his throat, nails scoring his chest, or the parade of cuffs and chains and molded leather fetish gear usually found only in niche porn films that follows. She slumps lower into her seat and crosses her legs, trying to steer her thoughts somewhere less extreme. She’s not ready to deal with her reaction to all _that_ on top of everything else.

The train screeching to a halt offers blessed distraction, and Dani leaps to her feet, glaring at the sliding doors until they hiss and creak apart. A stroll across the platform and up into the brisk evening air does wonders to drag her mind, kicking and screaming, out of the gutter.

Or almost out, anyway. There’s a reason she’s making the trek to SoHo.

On paper, she gets it. Bruises heal, and the information he gleaned had nearly saved a life, cruel twists of fate be damned. Anybody worth their badge would take a few licks if it meant everyone got to go home alive and whole at the end of the day.

What sticks in her craw, though, is how unnecessary it was, him getting that messed up. He _fainted_ when they kissed, for god’s sake. All she’d done at Claremont was hold him, and his eyes almost immediately glazed over. If a bit of physical intimacy could do that why, would Bright continue to throw himself headlong into situations designed to hurt him?

If he wanted to, that’s one thing, but even with the heads up on Brown, he hadn’t seemed one bit happy or satisfied or even content.

But then, it’s not too hard to imagine Bright would choose the rough road with a guarantee at the end over the easier path without one, if intensity is a factor at all.

She steps up to Malcolm’s door, looking automatically up at the warm glow leaking through the window by his bed. His bed, with its sturdy leather cuffs bolted to the wall.

Shaking her head, she hits the buzzer and rocks back on her heels. There’s a bar a couple of blocks away she can hit up if he doesn’t answer, or if it doesn’t go the way she thinks it might. Hell, a date with her Hitachi would’ve taken care of this energy caught crackling under her skin.

She hits the buzzer a second time. The silence goes on long enough that she decides on what she’s in the mood to drink, and she’s halfway there on the kind of woman that would go with it.

Bright’s staticky hello coming out of the speaker almost gets her jumping out of her skin. Her mouth dries up, spit and words both.

“Hello?” he asks again, impatient.

“Uh, it’s me.... It’s Dani. Can I come up?”


	16. Cross My Water 'til You Drown

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Related track: [Take Me Apart by Kelela](https://youtu.be/VAaJJNQNq6I) (YouTube).

It’s never easy to shake off a visit to Claremont, but the sick dread of seeing Ainsley there is almost impossible to banish with the echo of John Watkins’ voice dogging his retreat home.

To blank his mind and tire his body, he goes for a run. The six mile loop down to Battery Park followed by a hot shower helps and even gives him a decent appetite for a proper meal, which he actually enjoys.

It’s still only a matter of time until he’s lost in his head again.

His day becomes a blur of coping strategies. He tries meditation exercises both old and new, playing with Sunshine and trying to read, then yoga when the book fails to catch his attention. A second, much hotter shower, texting with his therapist, giving the book he knows he’s interested in another go, and interspersed throughout it all, Dani’s voice: _Call me if you need anything, okay?_

He picked up his phone half a dozen times and set it back down again without dialing her number. One of them needs to stay focused on the case. With a defeated sigh, Malcolm collapses on the couch.

The third time turns out to be the charm with the book, and finally his mind is almost fully engaged. It isn’t exactly a kinship he feels with Margery Kempe, given her extreme religiosity and her reality as a 14th century Christian mystic, but he does understand how she wrestles with the validity of her visions. He skims the more mundane sections of her autobiography—impressive, not only for being an incredibly rare find for the time but also because of her documented illiteracy—and wonders at the differences between their experiences with her driven by spirituality and him by science.

He’s so caught up in Margery’s most visceral vision yet that the buzzer on the door goes at first unnoticed, then quickly becomes an inconvenience. A part of him considers ignoring it except it could be Mother, and he’d be a fool to miss the chance for some positive reinforcement to the benefits of _not_ barging in on him.

He devours another paragraph before slipping his finger into the pages to hold his place and going to the intercom.

When it’s Dani who answers his carelessly irritated greeting, his entire body flushes hot, and his brain shuts down.

“Bright?”

“Hey, Dani, I—uh, yeah,” he stammers, fumbling with his book. “Yeah, of course, one second.” He buzzes her in, unlocks the front door, then takes off at a scrambling run to make himself presentable.

He loses the book somewhere between the kitchen and the bathroom. A bit of product tames the wispy scatter of his hair from letting it air dry, and a quick pass with his toothbrush makes him feel better. His clothes are wrinkled but casual, so—

His clothes are _fine,_ he tells his reflection. Dani’s been by often enough he doesn’t have to worry this much about presentation. Still, he darts out to make sure he’s there to welcome her in.

“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” she says, easing the door open to peek in before he waves her inside.

“Not at all, I was just reading.” He waves dismissively in the general direction of his abandoned book and then glances at his phone, sitting where he’d left it near the row of his pill bottles. “I didn’t miss a call, did I?”

“No! No, I was in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop by.”

His doubt must’ve shown because she drops her chin and scrunches up her face. “That’s not exactly true,” she confesses, her posture turning mildly defensive. “I came by because I was worried about you. You were really rattled after seeing your dad this morning.”

Malcolm’s stomach does a slow, uneasy flip. He eases onto a stool at the breakfast bar, perched on the very edge of the hard seat, and gestures helplessly. “I know he’s involved, I just can’t prove it. And....” Agitation already spiking, he draws in a cleansing breath and lets the exhale carry a fraction of it away. “And maybe you were right about Ainsley all along.”

A deep furrow appears between Dani’s brows. “What makes you say that? You didn’t do anything to yourself again, did you?”

Change his meds on his own, she means, or trigger himself somehow. He shakes his head and mumbles, “No,” abashed enough he smoothes out a little wrinkle of denim bunching at his thigh to soothe it. “I got a flash of Ainsley with bloody hands again, but—” He curls his fingers inward before they can tremble.

“But you don’t know for sure, and it’s eating you up inside,” Dani finishes for him. She holds for a moment where she is, then closes the distance between them to gather up his hands. “Look, maybe… maybe there’s another way for you to see this stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I—” her gaze flickers down to her hands on his. “It happened before, didn’t it? When we kissed. And earlier today, you saw something then, too.”

Both things that are true and have been bothering him ever since. He can’t figure out the why of it, especially since it doesn’t fit with anything he thinks he knows about the way his visions work. If it’s another pathway to deliberately triggering his gift, why has it only manifested now? And why in such a way that feels like nothing but a punishment for daring to care for someone?

He follows her gaze to where their hands are clasped warmly together. Where would the justice be in giving him this only for it to be inevitably followed by blood and death and horror?

“What are you saying?” he asks, desperate to see what she does for her to think there’s a better way.

Dani releases his hands, her mouth quirking to the side as she reclaims a bit of space between them. “I don’t know. Or I’m not sure. Part of me thinks maybe we should see if it happens again.” She shrugs and forces herself to keep her eyes on his, the struggle of it clear in the whisper her voice drops to. “The other part worries about whether that’s the only reason you’d want to?

“But then,” she says, the words picking up speed, “if it triggers your murdervision, what does that mean? Where would it leave us? Not that there even is an ‘us,’” crashing into each other as her voice grows stronger again, her usual confidence replaced by a frustration he knows only too well.

Where he paused for a calming breath, she throws up her hands and slams on the brakes. “I’m sorry, I should go,” she says, and tosses a mildly panicked look towards the door. “This was a stupid idea, and we should forget about it.”

“Don’t.” Malcolm bolts to his feet, tripping a little on the rungs of the stool as he reaches outs. “Please.”

She sways, clearly torn. His heart thunders in his chest as he searches for the right words, his pulse echoing between a host of half-formed confessions. “I don’t know why it happened,” he says, forcing air to move through the tightness in his throat, “and I don’t know if it would again, but I’d give just about anything to find out. Not because of what I might see. Because it’s you.”

The push and pull between them is tangible, magnetic. It raises the hair on his arms and across the back of his neck, tiny electric pinpricks that spiral out until not only can he see all the ways this can go, he can feel the ghosts of futures not yet unrealized vibrating in the timelessness between seconds.

_“I’m sorry,” she whispers then turns and flees. // She looks at him with longing and shakes her head, curls swinging wildly as she retreats and the door slams shut between them. // She toes at the floor, frozen with uncertainty until his hands touch her shoulders. // Slowly nodding, her mouth curves in a beautiful smile as she cradles his face between her palms. // She huffs, rolls her eyes heavenward and says, “Fuck it,” striding back into his space and—_

—their mouths come together in perfect synchronicity.

A skitter-flare of fireworks erupts low in his stomach. Her palms are cool and dry on his cheeks, lips faintly sticky with gloss as they press to his. The tentative touch of her tongue weakens his knees, and he screws his eyes shut, waits for the heat blooming in his chest to blacken at the edges and curdle like blood.

The darkness doesn’t come.

“Anything?” Dani asks, her eyes searching his.

This single moment shatters, spirals out in mirror-like shards of infinite reflections with them as the anchor at its core.

_He smiles, whispers, “Nothing but now,” and lets his eyes drift shut before leaning back into the kiss. // He says, “No,” and she smirks, says, “All right then,” and boldly takes his mouth again. // She catches his face when he tries to look away and turns it back to her. // He can’t find his tongue and she gives him a softly pitying glance. // The future comes crowding in like a great, black tide, and he swallows down the sharp bite of acid in the back of his throat._

He fights free of the futures tumbling all around him like a great foaming waterfall and tries to breathe, startled when the air flows freely. “Something’s different, something’s happening to me,” he says.

“Different how?” Dani asks, and the shattered moment snaps back into place, full of a hushed stillness, like a plucked string come to rest.

“Different… different,” he says, and for a split-second he isn’t sure that he knows she’s about to roll her eyes because he saw it, or because he knows her. “I can’t quite explain it because I don’t entirely understand it. It wasn’t a violent death.”

She blinks at him. “That’s a positive, isn’t it?”

He sucks in his bottom lip, a bit of sweetness from her gloss spreading to his tongue. “Maybe?”

Dani bursts into laughter. Her fingers tangle in the cotton of his tee, knuckles pressing into his chest like she wants to shake some sense into him. “Only _you_ would think not getting slammed by a gruesome vision of someone’s death isn’t obviously a good thing.”

“When you put it that way,” he says, chagrined and willing to take the moment of relief her laughter offers. He might have protested, or at the very least attempted to explain the scattershot of visions, but that quiet warmth is making itself known again, pulling him back to what they started.

He realizes he’s holding his breath at the same moment he notices Dani is doing the same.

Unbidden, he thinks of the weeks with Eve where sometimes everything felt like a dream and he was a puppet in it, blissfully going through the motions of discovery and uncertainty and the discomfort that came with it. He tried so hard to believe happiness couldn’t exist without that dark undercurrent of vulnerability.

But here and now, there’s no rippling undertow of unease, no ugly suspicions or lingering doubts. The thrill of uncertainty and discovery is still there—and desire too, so much of it he aches—and beneath it, shoring it up, is trust.

 _I want to kiss you again,_ he thinks. Butterflies stir in his belly, a rustle of delicate wings. “Are we—?”

“Unless you tell me we need to stop,” Dani says, her mouth nudging his, “or you faint again. Please don’t faint again.”

Her arms slip around his shoulders as he opens to the push of her tongue, as his hands find her waist. They’re both fighting smiles as they stumble in the vague direction of the bed, and his entire body feels light, no weight to his steps. He swoops down, preparing to catch Dani behind the knees, and loses breath at the sharp jab of fingertips into his chest.

“Oh, no,” she says, sliding easily out of reach. She walks backwards warily. “Malcolm Bright, you are not even gonna try to pick me up.”

“I’m stronger than I look,” Malcolm says, his eyes narrowing.

“I’m not doubting your strength or your balance, Bright. But I refuse to be dumped on the bed like some kind of prize.”

He hadn’t meant it as some Neolithic gesture. “Fair enough.”

There are thorns wrapped around her, delicate and sharp as broken glass, that he hasn’t really seen before. He may have caught a glimmer of them a time or two during cases they worked, or around certain suspects or people like Vijay, who are liberal with their charm and their touch, but he’d had no reason to look deeper.

“How about the reverse?” he says, skipping past her to hop up on the step and spin around. “I’m not exactly a stranger to letting a woman take charge.” He holds his arms out and cocks a brow, a silent offer to let her push him to the mattress.

“That doesn’t surprise me, but how about we just see what vibes,” she counters smoothly. Still, the offer alone changes the dynamic, and her hands, when they smack lightly to his belly and travel up the front of his chest, are more sure.

“Works for me,” he murmurs, leaning eagerly into the weight of Dani’s hands on him. He takes hold of her hips again, light and hovering, a tingling current going up his arms whenever the loose fabric of her shirt tickles against his wrists or his palms brush against the worn denim of her jeans.

That same effervescent thrill dances across his skin when their mouths catch and drag together. A swipe of his tongue against her lips turns the kiss slippery sweet, and as he licks into her mouth, he holds back the moan that comes with the thought of her allowing him between her thighs.

How often has he dreamed of this? In the shower, hazy and warm, hand fisted around his cock. On the rare good nights when he’s lucid enough to sink into the fantasy and wake with nothing but soft pleasure to shepherd him through the day. During stolen moments poring over cramped notes when she’s close enough that he can feel the heat of her skin and he’s let his mind wander to _what if?_

She doesn’t shove him onto the bed so much as firmly guide him down, her knee denting the mattress as he settles back. He gazes up at her, dizzied and awestruck. The light through the window glows azure against her skin, catches in her curls and on the curve of her lip, a shining contrast to the soft glow of the lamp that turns her resplendent. Radiant.

She shrugs out of her jacket, letting it fall to the floor behind her, and as he studies her face, he catches sight of a dozen small things he’s never noticed before: the tiny divot in her forehead, the scatter of freckles across her nose, the slight asymmetry in her brows….

He holds still when her fingers skim down his front and she thumbs open the button of his jeans. “You know, casual’s a good look on you,” she says, pushing her hands up and beneath his shirt. The blunt edges of her nails raise shivers in their wake, her touch rewriting the scattered reminders left on his skin from less generous hands.

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Leaning up on his elbow, Malcolm catches the back of his shirt at the neck and helps tug it up over his head.

Dani’s gaze goes instantly to the patterns beaten and bitten into his flesh. She thumbs the edge of a yellowing bruise striped across his shoulder. “You really like that stuff?” she breathes, a second question hidden in her tone.

He watches the gentle sweep of her hand. “Usually.”

“But not this time. That’s why you were so fucked up.”

“One could argue that fucked up is my default setting,” he says, giving in to the unavoidable instinct to mask things with a bit of sardonic humor. He takes a moment to gather his courage and follow it up with a far more genuine explanation. “The marks can be fun to get, and they’re generally a reminder of a good time. Except I played with some folks I shouldn’t have—usually wouldn’t have. I—” he takes a slow, steadying breath. “I thought it was the best way to get what we needed.”

Dani’s gaze flicks up to catch his as her palm spreads to obscure the entire bruise. “You don’t think that now?”

He grimaces, struggling to answer honestly. “I can’t say I wouldn’t do it again, but I’d definitely think twice.”

“Good enough,” she says, and her breathy laugh rekindles the glow in his belly.

Malcolm touches the hem of her shirt and hopes she recognizes that the trembling of his fingers is born of eager exhilaration and not something else. “Can I?” he asks, and when she nods, he helps skim it off.

She seems surprised when his eyes don’t drop immediately to her chest, but even if the lace edge of her bralette hovers temptingly in his peripheral, he’s already caught by the dark sweep of her lashes. Statistics scroll through his mind, the many possible hurts she’s borne, but he blinks them all away. Numbers are just that, and he’s determined not to profile her.

Still holding to the earthy warmth of Dani’s gaze, Malcolm settles back down into the softness of the bedding, releasing all the tension from his muscles like he’s in shavasana. She isn’t a natural top, not in the slightest, but making it clear he’s willing to let her set the pace gives her room to breathe even as it leaves him breathless.

A smoky darkness takes over her expression as she straddles his hips and leans over him, her forearms bracketing his shoulders. Gently, she pushes a few stray bits of hair away from his eyes, and her breath hovers at his cheek before her lashes sweep down and she drops kisses to the corner of his mouth.

He slides his hands up the outside of her thighs as she tilts her head and seals her mouth over his, her tongue darting out to taste him. He licks back at the soft curl of it, an even softer moan welling up in his throat. She rocks against him, against his cock trapped and aching near the join of his thigh, and she sucks with new vigor at his lip as his fingers inch into the back pockets of her jeans. Is she equally turned on, he wonders. Is her clit taut and her lips slick with the wetness slowly soaking into her underwear?

The thought makes him harder, and he presses up to meet the next grind of her hips. A soft hum rises in her chest, and she kisses him deeper, tongue working into his mouth with the same rhythm of her moving against him. His toes dig into the floor as he lifts his hips, his knees spreading wide—

_—to tuck the curve of her ass tighter against him. // His knees spreading on hardwood, her thumb tracing his mouth, pressing in to pin his tongue. // His knees spread wide, her settling between them as the cool kiss of metal on the harness warms quickly against the bare skin of his thighs. “Are you ready?”_

He breaks the kiss with a shaky inhale, body straining as his head tips back, throat stretching long to invite her mouth towards his pulse. Dizzied by the parade of lustful wishful thinking or another strange echo of what could be, he arches beneath her. A full-body shudder wracks him when the point of her tongue traces up the path of his jugular. “If you wanted to, you could peg me,” he gasps out.

She goes still, her lips shivering at the hinge of his jaw, and his stomach drops. Maybe he shouldn’t have said anything. Isn’t it less taboo now? The sort of thing talked about on _Salon_ and _Bustle_ and your average women’s magazines? And Dani hadn’t blinked when she’d helped strap him into bed, however many months ago. Fuck. Sex, when you pay for it or when it’s negotiated beforehand is so much simpler, he thinks, but then her breath skims across the shell of his ear. “Are you serious?”

A tingling shiver ripples through the low of his belly. “Very. Chest at the foot of the bed if you want to see what I’ve got to work with.”

Slowly, she rises onto her wrists to look down on him. Her lips press together, dimpling her cheeks where a flush has spread. Embarrassment? Excitement? “I’ve never fucked a guy like that before.”

“Just a thought.”

“Yeah?” A curious tip of her head and her curls go slipping off her shoulder along with the narrow strap of her bralette. Her thighs squeeze at his hips. “What else have you been thinking about?”

An answer already waits on his tongue. “Pulling your underwear off with my teeth, burying my face between your legs, and making you come with my mouth so hard that you see stars.”

The rosy stain on her cheeks deepens, and she raises her brows as she slides away and stands up to survey him. “Damn, Bright,” she rasps, desire thickening her voice. She doesn’t head for the trunk, though, just bends over to unzip her boots and kick them free. Her hands flirt at the waist of her jeans, and she shakes her hair back as she levels him with a thoughtful look. “Every time I think I know what to expect from you….”

“What happened to ‘that doesn’t surprise me?’” he teases, mimicking her tone from earlier.

“Okay, I just didn’t expect dirty talk from mister ‘I’ve had sex… plenty of sex,’” she says, mocking him right back as she shucks her pants and pulls off her socks. The slant of her smile dissolves into something hungry as he inches back towards the pillows and kicks free of his own pants.

“Is it dirty talk if I was just answering your question?” Now, he lets his gaze travel, sliding down to where her nipples are peaked beneath the thin stretch lace of her bralette, then beyond to the shallow dip of her navel and the spread of her hand still faintly guarding the low of her belly. He takes in the whole of her, from the plain cotton boy shorts to the flare of her hips, to the little scatter of short, dark hairs on the inside of her knee she clearly missed the last time she shaved her legs.

“You always have to be right, don’t you?” Rejoining him on the bed, she settles beside him with her head pillowed on her arm to study his face with a quiet intensity.

He turns towards her, reaching up to snag an actual pillow for her. “It’s a strategy to minimize feelings of insecurity,” he says matter-of-factly, stifling the urge to apologize. “It pairs really well with a fear of abandonment.”

Dani wrinkles her nose, and her attention skips to his mouth. “I preferred the dirty talk to the psychology lesson.”

“Noted,” he murmurs, turning further, his arm extending over her body and urging her to roll with him. Once on her back, her breath catches briefly, and he takes care not to cage her in as he twists to trail kisses down the center of her chest. He detours to run his lips over the swath of lace to the taut point of one nipple, teasing it through the fabric until it’s hard enough that he can catch it lightly with his teeth.

She sucks in a hissing breath, and her hands come up to tangle in his hair. He glances up to see the white line of her teeth bitten into her lip and resumes his downward path. The brush of his mouth across her skin triggers a cascade of shivers that echoes through him sympathetically, and he lips at where the elastics of her underwear dig into the softness of her belly. He nuzzles a kiss there before hooking a finger into the waist to lift it away from her skin and let him bite down on it to peel it down.

With her legs still together, Malcolm gets Dani’s underwear pulled down only so far, but the flex of her fingers against his skull remain a needy plea so he puts his mouth to the peak of her thighs to moan, “I can’t wait to taste you.” His breath bleeds hot through the thin bit of fabric, shunts back as he rolls his tongue out, an electric current zipping along his spine when he can feel the firmness of her clit beneath the layer of cotton. He teases the swell with the point of his tongue, his lips, and the hard line of his teeth, pausing only when there’s a pressure again in the air, something hovering in the very back of his mind.

_//Her hand moves to the flat of her belly and down, pulling aside fabric to bare herself to him.//_

It’s easier this time to blink the echo away and ignore it in favor of what’s real right now, in this moment.

Curling his hands into the fabric bunched at Dani’s hips, he can feel the trembling of her belly as he keeps the flat of his tongue crushed and moving against her. His mouth floods wet, soaks the cotton until a hint of salt blossoms under the firm drag of his tongue. He sucks his spit and the taste of her back out of it, glancing up to catch the widening of her eyes as he rubs his face leisurely against her. He lifts his head and offers her a flirty, blissful smile as he nudges her underwear down with the point of his chin, his open mouth drifting over her mons as he slides her boy shorts towards her knees.

“If this is all you want...” he helps free her legs then sets his palms to her thighs to spread them open, “... I need you to know, you’ll have made my night.” Kissing a sucking path up the inside of Dani’s leg heightens the giddy anticipation quivering in his belly, leaves his cock hard as steel against the bed when he settles between her thighs again. He flicks his tongue out, taking soft lapping licks at the plush swell of her labia as he inhales the scent of her. She moves to meet him, body rising to the wet trail of his tongue, but as he twists to suck a kiss at her folds, she goes tense.

“Don’t like that?” he asks, glancing up again, but she’s looking past him to the stretch of his body sprawling across the foot of the bed. _Ah._ The bruises on his back from the belting will be uglier shades of purple than the stripes left on his shoulder and upper arm. He licks a bit of slickness off his lip and rubs a hand over her leg to soothe her concern. Her hands in his hair tighten reflexively, and his eyes go heavy-lidded at the tug to his scalp. “They, uh, look worse than they are. It was only a bad scene for me emotionally. The people I was with weren’t the type I’d normally play with, but they knew what they were doing.”

Dani rips her eyes away from his back, and one of her hands slips down to mold against his cheek as if weighing his sincerity. “I don’t understand it,” she admits. “Not the part that isn’t you throwing yourself to the wolves to save a life, anyway.”

He turns his face and presses a kiss into her palm, huffs a quiet laugh against crisscrossed lines. “You don’t have to. But we can talk about it some time, if you want to try to understand it.”

She nods, and that seems to quell the disquiet of seeing his skin so thoroughly maculate with bruises. It’s a surprise then, when she asks if she can touch them. At the flash of shock in his eyes, she explains, “You seemed to like it when I touched the one on your shoulder, and I, um,” her eyes shift to the ceiling and she scrapes her teeth over her lip, “usually find my hands end up there when someone, you know, goes down on me.”

“Please,” he moans, his whole body coiled and tight at the thought of her touching him where he’s tender, the dull ache of the bruises no longer a sole reminder of greasy smiles and clinking chains. He dips his head, fucks his hips against the bed for a bit of friction to take the edge off, and sucks a kiss at the velvety juncture of her groin. “God, please.”

Body thrumming, waiting for the slide of her palms to curl over his shoulders, Malcolm nuzzles against the softness of her, his lips and tongue gliding across slick, hot flesh. When the sweep of her touch caresses him, his focus narrows in on the way she responds to each pass of his mouth. She bucks and shivers at the plunge of his tongue into the slick, fiery core of her as he thumbs at her clit, but it’s the reverse that gets her fingers digging into him like she never wants him to stop. She clenches around the curve of his fingers sunk inside her as he alternates between sucking at the hard throb of her clit and teasing it with light flicks of tongue.

Every so often, he’s rewarded by a faint moan or a quiet gasp, a few memorable curses and a catch in her breath that makes his cock surge with want. Desire courses through him, rides his veins and leaves him with a blissful high as he feels Dani come twice on his fingers and his tongue. She’s sweat-damp and shaking when he rises to wipe his hands and face dry on his discarded shirt and give them both a bit of a break. He shifts to kneeling, sitting back on his heels and grinning as she flings her arms overhead and catches her breath. Like before, the light from the window bathes her skin, glistening now in scattered hues.

“Oh my god.” Her chest heaves as she gulps down air.

“More?” he asks, ignoring the sting beneath his tongue where it’s been scraped raw.

Thrusting a hand out to stay him, she presses her thighs tight together and pants. “Just give me a minute.”

Malcolm leans forward, dips down to plant a kiss at her fingertips, and when her wary look doesn’t become a request to stop, he gives her a flirty smile and slides his mouth over the first two digits. He sucks on them gently, tongue rolling against the pads, his eyes eventually drifting shut as he falls into the simple pleasure of holding her fingers in his mouth. Crawling forward, he doesn’t let her fingers slip free until she retrieves them herself, and even then he’s not done servicing her. He drifts his knuckles along the wet crease of her pussy, up along the line of her body, until the back of his hand passes over the soft swell of her breast.

He leans in to suck a kiss at the hollow of her throat, says, “I really could spend all night with my face between your legs,” against her skin. A lick at her pulse, the bite of her sweat sharper than the salt-slick of her juices.

“That sounds great, but...” She lifts from the pillows enough to pull her bralette off with his help. Eyes catching his, her hand sneaks down to cup the front of his shorts, palm curving around the straining length of his cock. “I want to see what you hide under those perfectly tailored suits.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He flashes a grin and flops to the bed beside her, hurrying to strip his underwear off. He follows her gaze as it jumps to where his cock slaps hard against his belly as soon as it’s freed.

“First, never call me ma’am again. Second… not bad, Bright,” Dani declares, with a little quirk to her mouth that says the latter will help forgive him for the former. Her leg slides over his, skin whispering against skin as she eases into straddling his thighs. As she plants her palms on his chest, a quiet seriousness overtakes her expression. He lightly runs his hands up her arms, letting the touch trail back down to her wrists as she gazes down on him.

His whole self feels tense, stretched thin and quivering with the heat of her skin searing against his. The immediate urgency of sexual desire that throbs blood-rich with his pulse hovers, suspended with his breath as he waits for her to decide how she wants him. There’s no _if_ in his mind, not with the way she’s looking at him, but it could be her slipping down to wrap her mouth around him or having him lick her fingers to dripping so she can slip a wet fist down the length of his cock.

In the end, it’s her lifting to her knees, reaching down to hold his cock steady and sink down atop him, soft and hot and too perfect for words. It’s endless, that first joining of their bodies like this, the slick clench and the answering pulse. Even when her weight settles back on his thighs, her knees hugging his ribs, he slips deeper. Raw pleasure—red as blood, sharp and sweet in turns—wells up, and with it something more vicious prickles at the edges of his mind.

He squeezes his eyes tight, willing the ominous shadow away before it steals the blissfulness of her starting to move atop him, but it roars up with a hiss of angry static.

“Bright.” Dani’s hands clutch to his face with the same firm dig against his cheekbones as when venom had coursed through his veins. Even with her mouth slacked by pleasure, her gaze is a command. “Whatever it is, ignore it. Stay with me.”

“Someone’s going to die,” he tells her.

She leans down, presses their foreheads together, and the static recedes, softens, and slithers away like mercury. “Someone’s always going to die,” she says, and he clings to that simple fact like a lifeline. Somehow, he pulls himself back to her.

His hands go to her hips not to guide her, just to hold her as she holds him, with her body and her hands and the warmth of her eyes, suspending him in a place between pleasure and peace. Bursting with eager desire and gratefully sated all at once, when Dani moves, rises up so beautifully to take him deep, he can barely breathe.

“Stay with me,” she repeats, words rough with her own pleasure.

“I am,” he gasps, bracing his elbow on the mattress and offering his hands for her to steady herself on, their fingers twisting together as she uses him for leverage, too. That thought wedges in his mind, to be used by Dani like this, and his cock throbs so hard he knows she felt it. “It’s you, just you.”

She finds her rhythm, and he gives himself to it, moving as she does, the slow roll of their bodies like a wave rippling to shore. He savors how she looks in this moment—the flash of her tongue behind her softly parted lips, the gentle jiggle of her breasts, the shimmer at the hollow of her throat—and does his best to write it into his memory, indelible, before he slides his eyes shut and just lets himself _feel._

He doesn’t spare a thought for how long he’ll last, already halfway into a space that says it’ll be as long as she needs. The honey-warm heat of her is everything, but so is the clutch of her fingers silently telegraphing how good this is for _her._ Eventually, her grip eases, and she twists her palm against his, her thumb stroking over his. He opens his eyes and locks them back on hers, gathering her hand to his mouth to press a soft kiss to her knuckles.

Wordlessly, he shifts and sits up, reseating her and bracing his hand low on her back, the flex of her spine working beneath the spread of his fingers as his mouth meets her skin again. Kissing a path to her breast, tongue dragging wet to slip over the point of her nipple, Malcolm pours a moan into the building heat between them. The shiver that travels through her spurs him on, and between the flick of his tongue and the slow grind of their bodies, he’s rewarded by a shaky gasp, the embrace of trembling arms, and his name on her lips as they fall together into something beautiful.


	17. I Wanna Take You Home, Boy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Related track: [Open Your Eyes by STRFKR](https://youtu.be/mkeOoWquAqk) (YouTube).

Waking up to Elton’s _I’m Still Standing_ and the smell of coffee from the comfort of Bright’s bed is a lot more pleasant than peeling herself off the breakfast bar. But either way, mornings are definitely still on Dani’s shitlist.

She rolls over sluggishly and squints toward the kitchen, spotting the half-full French Press sitting there, but no sign of Malcolm. She drops back with a groan, keeping her eyes open and on the ceiling through sheer force of will. The soft sound of running water eventually gets through to her fuzzy brain.

With a heavy, heartfelt sigh, she drags herself free from the warm nest of sheets. Scanning the floor for her underwear, she finds them in the one place they never would’ve ended up in her place: on a chair, folded neatly with the rest of her clothing.

She stops in the middle of reaching for them, thinking instead about knocking on the bathroom door. Once she’s fully awake, she’ll probably take the time to figure out how she feels about all this beyond the thought that Malcolm is naked in there, soaking wet and soaped up, and his fit body sliding against hers would be a hell of a lot more effective in getting her going for the day than a cup of coffee.

But going by the morning light absolutely pouring through the window—why does an impossibly rich insomniac not invest in shades?—she not only slept over, she slept in. Muttering curses, she shakes out her clothes and hauls them on, hoping against hope that she won’t be late for today’s check-in with the boss.

Gulping tepid coffee and thumbing through her apps for Lyft, she glances up when the bathroom door opens and immediately forgets where it is she needed to go.

“You don’t need to bother,” Malcolm says, standing there in his tiny underwear and a t-shirt that clings to damp skin. His tongue peeks out to wet his lip.

_Damn, the things that tongue could do._

“There’s a car ready when you are,” he explains, “and I took the liberty of texting Gil an update on this morning’s plan, so you have time for a shower, too, if you want.” He steps aside to wave at the steamy bathroom. “Brand new toothbrush by the sink for you.”

Logically, Dani knows he means to be helpful. Keeping that in mind tempers her reaction to being maneuvered so neatly. “What plan?”

“The one where I asked you to go down to ADN with me first thing to talk to my sister about any recent contact she’s had with Dr. Whitly and the victims. Give him a call to confirm,” he says, smile edging towards a conspiratorial smirk while also managing to look like he’s hoping she’s pleased, “and you’re off the hook with no one the wiser.”

“You could’ve just woken me up.”

“Given that I’m not exactly a restful sleeper,” he says, one eyebrow crawling up his forehead, “I’m not convinced anything short of a splash of water to the face was going to wake you up.”

“Yeah, well,” she says, groping for an excuse that isn’t a credit to his skills in bed. She’s never been anything other than a three alarms at minimum type of person, anyway. “Just give me a minute.”

She makes it quick. So does Bright, who’s back to his impeccably dressed self when she exits the bathroom. Thanks to her now-intimate familiarity with his body underneath all that bespoke tailoring, she has a new appreciation for the way it accentuates the breadth of his shoulders and the trimness of his waist.

She waffles back and forth on mentioning how fine he looks as they head down to street level. Once inside the quiet of the town car—she could get used to this—she gives Gil a quick call, confirming that she’s with Bright and they’re going straight to ADN. The station isn’t that far from the precinct, so she doubts he buys the excuse, but if he’s got that _look_ on his face, it at least isn’t making its way into his voice.

JT, on the other hand, is bursting with skepticism and theories, and isn’t shy about slamming her phone with a cascade of messages.

## JT

####  **Today** , 10:13 AM

JT
    👀
    u sick of working w me? or is it my driving? 🤪
    o shit. u hit it didnt you?
    titos going 2 b soooooo sad. 🍆💔
    if u didnt tho tell me otherwise i owe ur friend 💵 💵

Dani
    🙄

**Delivered**

She doesn’t elaborate, refusing to give JT the satisfaction. But she does subtly angle her phone away from Bright to fire off a quick text to Leti.

## Leti

####  **Today** , 10:16 AM

Dani
    Collect your paper from my dumbass partner
    👅🍑

**Delivered**

The next flurry of messages from JT are at least related to the cases they’re working.

## JT

####  **Today** , 10:19 AM

JT
    hey. btw. analysts might have something on the 🏆s.
    nothing confirmed but we dug up a handful of cold cases w oddball stuff reported missing.
    im still looking in2 it. more 4 u when u come in. 🌚

Dani
    Any word if John Watkins has had any visitors while hes been in custody?

JT
    his creepy af grammas been bringing him cookies twice a week

Dani
    Anything else?

JT
    not from the log. u want me 2 pull his schedule coming up?

Dani
    Please

**Delivered**

“JT says there are a couple more cases that might fit the profile of a trophy taker,” she says, tucking her phone under her leg. “Literal trophy taker.”

Bright gives her a look.

“What? Only _you’re_ allowed to make corny jokes?”

He smiles to himself, cheeks dimpling from that soft, almost-shy quirk of his lips that she can count on one hand the number of times she’s seen on his face.

She lets the silence ride for a few more blocks. She can’t get a read on how Malcolm is feeling either about last night or his sister, but then, she hasn’t exactly been an open book this morning. Maybe he’s still following her lead.

“How do you want to handle this when we get there?” she asks.

Split-second surprise shows in his eyes; it isn’t like her to defer to anyone in the field unless they hold rank, so she’s pretty sure he gets what she means by it. He rubs thoughtfully at the edge of his lip with a thumb. _Fuck, that mouth._ A few more blocks pass by before he decides, “When we get to the studio, let me talk to Ainsley. I still can’t shake the feeling that my father is behind this.”

His instincts are often right, but often isn’t always. She starts to ask if he’s sure he wants to do that alone, but what she really wants is a reason to object. Trusting that he won’t spook his sister is the better way to handle it; he needs backup, not a keeper.

“Alright, you take Ainsley,” she says. “I’ll look into any repeated phone calls, creepy fan mail, or stalkers on record that might point to our guy.”

Deciding on an angle of approach usually settles Dani down, gives her a point of focus. With the silence building back up, it feels instead like a countdown to tragedy. Is this how it always is for Malcolm? Knowing that something awful is coming down the line, one way or another?

She catches the beginnings of a tremble in his fingers on the seat beside him. Not enough that he curls them to a fist, but enough to cause him to flex his hand to stop it from worsening. Pushing aside the hesitation, she reaches over to lay her hand over his, fingers threading between his when he glances over at her with a look somewhere between surprise and solace.

The morning after, in her experience and without exception, is a minefield. But here she is, holding Bright’s hand, and whatever it is between them feels a long way off from filling her with that special kind of dread that turns to a parade of regret and second-guessing. If everything were business as usual, she would be smack in the middle of a group chat with Leti leading the charge while the squad either tries to convince her to let things go where they will, or tell her she’s being too critical.

The single biggest upside to—dating? Is that where they’re headed? Are they ‘involved’ now?—someone you already know is a complete mess that she can see, is that she’s already had Bright at his worst. And with it, how genuinely hard he works to be better.

She can do the same.

* * *

Her badge and his name get them past reception. Inside the studio, an assistant escorts Bright to speak with his sister while Leslie, the producer they’d met during the Carousel Killer case, comes to collect Dani.

The first time Dani had set eyes on her, she’d felt that instant spark that said this woman was just her type: gorgeous, fearless, and guaranteed to stomp all over her heart with flawless Louboutins.

On the way back to Leslie’s modest office, Dani studies her with a fresh eye.

Leslie pulls a small bottle of water from a mini fridge and twists off the cap, handing it off to Dani without asking if she wants it. The aura of effortless confidence surrounding Leslie reminds her of the people who always manage to be the center of attention without seeking it, the ones who’re more often than not more focused on finding angles.

“How can I help you this time, detective? Do we have another serial killer on our hands?” Leslie asks as if she’s making small talk, not fishing for a story.

“We believe a person of interest may have an unhealthy fascination with Ainsley Whitly,” Dani says, going for a nicely official tone in contrast.

“So, a stalker, then.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Leslie offers a practiced smile with painted lips. “No, you didn’t. But you also wouldn’t be here if you didn’t believe there’s some risk to her.”

“Our consultant, her brother, wanted to give the matter some personal attention. I’m here as a courtesy to them both.”

Leslie shrugs, but the glitter of her eyes says she’s unconvinced by the excuse. “Well, stalkers are something we certainly have experience with. I can have our communications team forward anything we’ve gotten recently which could be construed as a threat or a concern.”

“We’d appreciate that,” Dani says, pulling out her card and dropping it on the desk. Someone like Leslie will most likely put on a cooperative face, but won’t be inclined to share much, if any, actual information. “How’s Ainsley been holding up? We know she took some time off after everything that happened.”

Leslie looks in the studio's direction. “Ainsley seems to be doing fine. Back at it.” As her gaze swings back to Dani, it skips briefly to a stack of papers near her mouse. She scoops them up, gives them a sharp tap to straighten them out, then sets them neatly aside.

It’s too late; Dani knows a Corrections Department visitation request form when she sees it. “Filming something at Rikers?”

“More often than you’d think,” Leslie replies smoothly. “Just another interview.”

“If you need any help with that, you have my number.”

Leslie picks up the card and scrapes the edge against her thumb. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

That look leveled at Dani would normally have stirred up something low in her gut, and she’d think hell, if it doesn’t work out with Malcolm, here’s one more bad decision to carve into her bedpost because sabotaging a good thing before it’s had a chance to sour is one of the stupider ways she tries to protect herself.

“That’s really all I needed,” Dani says, rising. “Whatever your team has on hand, we appreciate the help. Can I ask you to walk me to where Ainsley is?”

Down a few identical hallways, through two different maze-like newsrooms crammed with cubicles, and into a makeup room that smells of powder and wax, she finally lays eyes on Bright. So far, this trip looks to be going as well for him as it had for her.

Perched on the edge of a counter, Ainsley has her arms folded over like a bouncer, her face icily aloof as Bright pleads with her. She doesn’t blink when the door opens, and doesn’t interrupt, and that more than anything has Bright losing steam. It’s hard to argue with someone who won’t argue back.

“You need to stop talking to him,” Bright says tiredly, his hands clasped and held out in a perfect display of unabashed begging. “Nothing good will come from talking to Watkins.”

“We’ve already had this discussion,” Ainsley says, dropping the temperature by another few degrees. “I’m not having it again in front of my boss.” She gives Dani an unimpressed once-over with frost-tipped daggers in her eyes. “Or your... _detective.”_

“Ains, please—”

“I think that’s enough,” Leslie interrupts, gliding across the room to usher Bright firmly towards the door. Her smile is perfectly politely apologetic as she sweeps Dani up in hustling them out. “We have a segment to get on air, and it seems like the detective and your brother have some important police work to do.”

Dani’s willing to let it slide, and for a split-second, she’s legitimately shocked that Bright’s going to let someone get between him and his sister. Then Ainsley’s ringtone goes off and the screen lights up with a big, blaring ‘Claremont,’ and Bright tries to push past Leslie and snatch the phone right out of Ainsley’s hand.

“Bright!” Dani shouts, darting after him. The last thing they need is Ainsley’s bold as brass producer filing an assault charge. She takes hold of his elbow in a grip usually reserved for the worst kinds of scumbags. “We need to leave.”

He stops reluctantly, straining against her hold like a stubborn dog as Ainsley whirls away. She puts the phone to her ear, her too-cheerful greeting for Dr. Whitly laced with saccharine venom.

The muscles at his jaw twitch, his anxious tension palpable in the air. This is the point where, with most men, Dani would be managing a building knot of dread beneath her mask of professionalism. She’s felt it so often that there’s an echo of that wariness now, the long indomitable wait for the first crack in his composure, the sudden speed of time as it widens into a fissure and red-hot rage bubbles to the surface, indiscriminate in its destruction.

But like the grief and frustration that had shattered him in the quiet of the conference room, it turns inward. She changes her grip in anticipation of him crumpling under its weight, grateful that he holds that, too, in check.

“C’mon,” she urges, tugging gently.

Nodding slowly, he follows. A melancholy silence dogs their steps, and he wilts further with every passing one. Waiting for the elevator, his shoulders drooping, she wonders how he’d have managed on his own. The cheerful ding announces its arrival, but getting him to move again is a fight with his feet trying to take root in the dull beige carpet, and once he’s in the car, he slumps back against the far wall, his head bouncing off the brushed nickel paneling with a hard knock.

Before she can decide whether to leave him to his brooding or shake him out of it, her phone goes off.

## JT

####  **Today** , 10:34 AM

JT
    got a little more info. ur not going 2 like it.
    turns out watkins has a special visitor planned for 2morrow at 10. ur never gonna guess who. 

Dani
    Yeah we just found that out

**Delivered**

JT
    o but thats not all. did u also find out who forked over all the 💵 for the surgeons new reno?
    cos ur going 2 like that even less.

“Shit,” Dani murmurs, closing her eyes. The severely diminished trust fund, the renewed interest in reconnecting with her father. The timing in relation to Endicott’s murder won’t turn out to be a coincidence.

She sits with the possible consequences for a long moment.

When she finally works up to facing Bright, she finds him barely on his feet, watching her with deep resignation and grief twisting his face into a cheap imitation of itself. He doesn’t need to say anything; neither of them do. The weighted silence speaks for them.

On the ground floor, they push out of the elevator before the incoming crowd blocks the way. Like a switch flipped, Bright breezes through the lobby ahead of her, his strides quick and noticeably jerky. The tension radiating up his spine and through the muscles of his back is a flashing neon sign.

He mutters under his breath about needing a walk. Before he disappears in the bustling crowd clogging the sideway, she lays a hand on his forearm. Beneath the thick wool, he’s shaking.

As his too-blue eyes tear away from the concrete and finally meet hers, instinct tips her forward. Their mouths slotting for a single, perfect instant stops him short.

Surprised at herself, Dani eases back just far enough to talk without the constant brush of lips. “Listen to me, Bright,” she says, feeling like she’s holding something dangerously fragile in her hands, “you did what you could. It’s up to your sister to make the right call. Whatever the fallout, it’s not on you, got it?”

His face full of nothing but doubt, he nods.


	18. May a Love Never Break You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Related track: [From Now On by Delta Spirit](https://youtu.be/MYldIuDAGGs) (YouTube).

After they part ways, Malcolm tries in vain to walk off his anxious frustration. He heads home and spends the following ten hours running through all the ways he could stop Ainsley from doing what she’s determined to do; most are some variation of pleading, “Please don’t do this, don’t become him, don’t betray me like he did.”

By the time they reconvene at the 16th the next day, he’s less a person and more a bundle of raw shredded nerves ready to do whatever it takes to protect his little sister.

He does his best to hold it together in the situation room with Dani while they wait for Gil and JT to show up. He manages exactly eleven minutes, twenty-two seconds before she tries to offer comfort.

“What has my father been telling her, that she thinks she’s going to go in there and kill a man in cold blood?” he asks, twisting away from Dani’s hand on his shoulder to pace a trench into the floor. “She’ll end up in a cell just down the hall! Unless… god.” Malcolm stops short, his eyes wide and blind. “That’s exactly what he wants, isn’t it?”

He immediately shakes his head and starts berating himself. That can’t be the end goal. There’s not enough glory in a single sensational burst of Like Father, Like Daughter headlines, regardless of how much satisfaction it might bring. It’s too impulsive for Martin Whitly, who would find far more pleasure in knowing that someone is set to continue his work. His ego won’t ever allow the family name to slip free of his twisted shadow.

“We’ve already confirmed where your sister will be and when.” Dani folds her arms over her chest. “We’ll be there to handle whatever happens, Bright.”

Malcolm pinches the bridge of his nose, grumbles, “Right, of course we will.” He doesn’t mean for the words to drip with bitterness; what she’s saying is reasonable. But how many times has he been in this same position with the knowledge to change the future and failed?

He won’t fail Ainsley again. He can’t.

Acid churns bitterly in his cramped stomach. Maybe he should’ve tried harder to choke down a breakfast bar, then at least he wouldn’t be on the verge of vomiting pure bile.

Shoving that aside for fear of a self-fulfilling prophecy, he focuses on his breathing. His lip is rubbed sore by nervous fingers, but he doesn’t have the capacity to control his stomach, his lungs, and a lifetime of stress responses.

Identify what you can control. The results of that particular assessment comprise a frankly pitiful number.

He stares at the crowded evidence boards, eyes flicking over the evidence but seeing none of it. On top of everything else, they still have a serial killer to catch, one he’s certain isn’t his sister, regardless of whatever madness Rikers might hold. That single thought is enough to start clearing the fog from his mind.

Gil’s warm, wide hand settling on his neck does the rest.

Allowing Gil to steer him from the situation room to his office, Malcolm gratefully digs his teeth into the more immediate problem: If, as he believes, their father has been talking to him—to Ainsley—through a tableau of murder, what’s the angle?

The Surgeon wouldn’t risk sending any murder junkie to do his dirty work. No, he chose a specific mentee for this—and those, Malcolm’s discovered, seem to be as numerous as the corpses credited to his name.

Vaguely, Malcolm hears Gil speaking. He nods and turns in a tight circle.

The discipline exhibited at crime scenes suggests a certain amount of trust, as Martin would require someone either obedient or controlled enough to not go off script, while the compulsion to take accolades or symbols of a victim’s power points to someone desirous of the same recognition his father enjoys. This suspect most likely doesn’t look to The Surgeon as a source of admiration, as Watkins had, but as one of envy. The killer wants for himself the things his father has, not to be the things his father is.

What, then, is the proverbial carrot?

Money is always a popular choice, but even a hefty down payment carries significant risks. It would be safer and smarter for Martin to tap into someone’s pathology as insurance, and to guarantee each task is carried out as intended. As tenuous as it is, both Rebecca Brown and Mark Lee had gotten in Ainsley’s way, intentionally or not making life harder for Dr. Whitly’s now-favored child.

A narcissist who experienced similar career setbacks, felt overlooked in school, or any number of imagined invalidations might relish the opportunity to deliver a fatal comeuppance regardless of the specific target. If the suspect was unable to move against the source of their own perceived mistreatment for any reason, not only would Martin be providing a proxy outlet, he could give the suspect a sense of deserving appreciation and recognition. Of being owed for solving a problem Martin, or even Ainsley herself, couldn’t.

Malcolm snaps his fingers, whirling around to face Gil. “Did you find out anything more about the first victim’s relationship to my sister? Like something that happened between them at school. A stolen boyfriend or a falling out? Anything that would’ve made Ainsley look bad?”

By the long-suffering smile he gets in response and the lack of a phone in Gil’s hand or anyone else in the office, Gil was almost definitely speaking to him directly, and he absolutely just butted right in. He ducks his head sheepishly to offer an apology that Gil waves away.

“From an interview JT did with a former professor, yeah. Ainsley filed a complaint against Harris for stealing her byline in the school paper. Harris claimed it was an error made by someone in layout, but the whole thing got a lot of attention on campus. Even made it into at least one tabloid.”

That’s something he should’ve known, but he hasn’t always been the best of brothers. Hell, when she was a freshman trying to make a name for herself untainted by their father, he was busy throwing himself into his work, dodging calls and leaving texts unread, doing anything and everything to avoid all reminders that he even had a family.

He can’t name a single friend of hers from college. Not one academic accomplishment or industry accolade, and as much as he’d like to believe the fault is mutual, he knows it began with him.

A lifetime of missed opportunities. He has a lot to make up for.

“That’s the through line,” he says. He’s sure of it; all the pieces fit. “These victims are not just connected to Ainsley, they’re connected to her career. Specifically, its development and anything that could be seen as stifling it.”

Gil gives him an uncertain look.

“The stolen byline, the negative press, the unnecessarily harsh rejection. I thought, maybe revenge. And it is in a way for our killer, I think. But it’s my father’s way of making up for lost time. It’s apologizing to her for not being there the way he was for me. For not supporting her.”

“The theory tracks,” Gil says, “but kid, we don’t have anything to connect him to it. We’re probably looking at an obsessive.”

“But why now,” Malcolm insists. “Look at the timing. If we—”

“Catch our killer,” JT says, shouldering his way into Gil’s office with a file in hand.

While Malcolm’s still recovering from JT being the one to jump in on the same wavelength, their gazes meet and JT offers a nod of acknowledgment. He hands the file to Gil. “Cross-referenced lists of witnesses, family and friends, and persons of interest on our three murders with the cold case shelf.”

“You found something,” Malcolm says, watching Gil give the files a cursory once-over before handing it off. He skims the notes immediately.

“Not until you and Dani asked me to pull records for John Watkins’ visitation records. Got a match on a last-minute schedule change for today’s interview,” JT says, tapping a page before Malcolm can flip past it. “Chester Phillips. Person of interest on this case here. He worked one of Harris’s shows, and he’s a card-carrying member of the production engineers union.”

“He’s been visiting Watkins?”

“Not yet, but he’s on the list.”

“With Ainsley,” Malcolm breathes. She isn’t going to kill Watkins. Their father is, and he’s going to use this man to do it. In one fell swoop, The Surgeon gets his revenge on Watkins for daring to harm his family, Ainsley gets the story of a lifetime by being on scene in the aftermath of one serial killer taking out another, and their suspect gets his glorious moment in the spotlight.

It’ll make for one hell of an apology.

* * *

Warily, Malcolm side-eyes JT from the passenger seat. He honestly didn’t know what to expect when, about to climb into Dani’s car as usual, he’d been seized from behind and propelled towards JT’s. Interestingly enough, Dani didn’t seem terribly surprised: she rolled her eyes, dropped into the driver’s seat, and left them to it.

A shovel talk, then.

Which he really thought would involve more actual talk. So far, it’s been crushing silence. As an intimidation technique, he can’t fault its effectiveness.

Finally, the anticipation is too much. He claps his hands loudly together and forces the most convincing smile he can manage given the circumstances. “I had better watch myself. You’ll kick my ass if I hurt her. That’s the jist of it, right? ... Jericho?”

JT snorts and gives a little shake of his head. “Man, if you think for one second that woman needs me to defend her honor or some shit, you don’t know her as well as you think you do.”

Malcolm sits back, impressed not the least because as much as they’ve reached a point of comfortable acceptance, he and Detective Tramel, he has a long way to go before he truly knows the man. “You obviously had a reason for kidnapping me.”

JT gives him a look like he’s reconsidering if Malcolm is worth the trouble. “Yeah, I wanted to warn you. You fuck with her and she will bury you alive. You wanna do it anyway?” He shrugs his shoulders and his lips. “By all means. I could always use a good laugh.”

Despite the façade of indifference, the subtext is loud and clear. Dani is his partner, and he’ll always have her back, but Malcolm’s part of the team now, so maybe JT’s got his, too.

* * *

The monitors for the private visitation rooms in Rikers are nothing like the aging, grainy screens that broadcast Claremont’s hallways. On the one labeled Room C, Malcolm easily reads Ainsley’s name on her visitor badge. Her cameraman is setting up with the help of a third man whose badge reads Chester Phillips.

Just like when she interviewed their father, they have minimal equipment. Still, Malcolm gauges that even with the extra hand, it’ll be another ten minutes before they’re ready for Watkins.

Ten minutes.

Malcolm stifles the urge to bounce on his heels as they go through the motions for special clearance. While they wait for a corrections officer to act as escort, Gil’s hand finds Malcolm’s shoulder.

“I’m going to stay here, kid, and fill Lieutenant Lowry in. You three don’t need me slowing you down.”

Automatically, Malcolm starts to reply that Gil won’t slow them down, but the truth is, if the walk through Claremont had winded him, he’s better off here. The cane could make for a formidable weapon, if he were more able to defend himself.

Malcolm nods, earning another reassuring squeeze as the gate unlocks and the detectives take the lead. The concrete hallways pass in a strange combination of him not really registering where they are but building a solid map of turns and checkpoints in his head, preparing for whatever situation they find themselves in while trying to anticipate the most likely.

What are the odds they’ve somehow worked fast enough? That none of the things he’s seen will come to pass?

Faced with so many failures trailing behind him like shadows, he almost can’t bear to hope.

Approaching yet another checkpoint, this one outside a corridor studded with private visitation rooms, the hair at the nape of Malcolm’s neck rises as if they’ve come to the edge of a brewing storm.

Dani tosses a glance over her shoulder at him. He wonders if she can feel it, too.

The hiss of her borrowed radio is startling in the hush after they’re cleared through the gate. Gil’s voice is laced with static. “Powell, confirm location.”

“Just cleared checkpoint H-8, we’re in the hallway just outside the rooms.”

“Get in there, pronto,” Gil orders, and the guard immediately rushes forward to unlock the door manually. “The cameras are compromised. We’ve lost eyes, and you’re on a delay.”

“Bright!” Dani calls, one hand moving briefly to where her sidearm would be if she hadn’t surrendered it at the gate, the other raised palm out signaling him to hold. Whatever the guard sees through the window drains the blood from his face.

Prickling gooseflesh breaks out all along Malcolm’s skin. He recognizes it as the same wild sensation that had echoed between him and Dani last night and grits his teeth; that’s his sister in there, he’s got to—

—to push past them and get to her first, protect her. // He snatches the stun gun off the guard’s belt and shoves his way into the room. // No… he moves to rip the stun gun from the guard’s hand and someone screams, Ainsley screams—// No. He does none of those things, because—

Because he can’t think, and he needs to think. He sees the guard draw a stun gun, and he looks to Dani as she steps in his way, her palm flat on his chest now to hold him back.

Her touch is a spark set to tinder. Time slows, the world itself peeling down to its unwoven threads. He stands outside himself, outside this one moment, caught and endless even as it passes in a flash, catapulting him past the span of seconds and the glimpses of a dozen futures yet to come, each pulsing with potential.

Too many choices end with the floor slicked in blood, with people dead who could have been saved. Some of those he could live with, but the knowledge that he doesn’t have to is heady, the way forward shining as clear as the pearls of light in Dani’s wide eyes; in them, he sees what needs to be done.

His hand closes over hers. He asks, “Trust me,” and something more than that passes between them. He lifts their hands away from his chest and the moment stretches infinite around them until she nods, her fingers squeezing his.

Released, Malcolm lunges for the guard before he can grab the door. “Let me go in there first.” He tosses a pleading look to JT for backup. “No one has to die.”

Through the window, Malcolm sees Watkins crumpled to the floor, red blossoming through his prison grays. Ainsley stands frozen, blinking away the same shock as when she’d been the one with a knife in her hands. The universe balances on an edge just as keen.

“He knows what he’s doing.” JT’s tone is an unsubtle command. “He’s former FBI.”

As the guard steps back, Malcolm slips through the door, both hands raised and leading the way. He surveys the scene quickly before focusing on Chester Phillips using Ainsley’s cameraman as a human shield, his hostage held captive by the point of a bloodied stiletto to the neck. It looks like a custom piece, mostly likely designed to slip past the scanners as a piece of disassembled sound gear.

“Chester,” Malcolm says calmly, locking eyes with their killer. “It is Chester, isn’t it? Do you know who I am?”

Chester’s grip on the cameraman tightens. “I know you weren’t supposed to be here, just your sister.”

“I didn’t mean to interrupt your plans, Chester. Or should I say my father’s plans?”

Malcolm risks a glance at Ainsley, noting a bit of color back in her cheeks. If a second body hits the floor, the knife will go skittering towards her. She’ll pick it up—if not the knife, then the half-assembled boom mic.

He jerks his thoughts away from the sound of blunted metal puncturing the side of Chester’s neck.

“But,” he says, wetting dry lips, “now that I am here, we should talk about what’s going to happen here. The security cameras are down, and my friends in the hall aren’t going to take you into custody if anyone in this room dies.”

A flicker of caution in Chester’s eyes. “What do you mean?”

“You’ve been making fools of them for weeks now, Chester. They’re pretty angry. Which is why you’re going to let that man go, and why you need to let my sister stop John Watkins from bleeding out.”

Carefully telegraphing his movements, Malcolm eases out of his suit jacket, and with every one, the various probabilities swirling around him narrow, drying out like rivers that have lost their headwaters. He holds the jacket out for Ainsley to take.

She’d tried—would’ve tried—on her own, her bare hands moving uselessly over Watkins’s stomach, unable to staunch the blood, but that outcome is already in the rearview, fading into nothingness. In the present, Watkins still has a chance.

“If you don’t let Ainsley put pressure on that wound and you don’t let that man go, I won’t be able to stop the police from firing at you when they come in here. You don’t want that, do you, Chester? I don’t want that.”

As Ainsley’s fingers reach tentatively for the jacket and Chester doesn’t object, Malcolm turns to give her a hurried rush of instructions. He doesn’t watch as she crouches over Watkins’s body, willing to trust in Ainsley now and keep his attention where it’s needed.

Chester’s goodwill is wearing thin. A fat trail of blood slides down the cameraman’s neck from where his pulse beats rabbit fast. “You seem to think you know a lot about me. Reminds me of your father.”

“I know you didn’t come here to die,” Malcolm tells him, and the air around them turns crystalline sharp, refracts and splits into a dozen near-mirror images. In several, he makes a grab for Chester. In others, he makes a grab for the hostage. The future splits again, scatters around him, limitless. Paralyzing. So much death, he’ll drown in it.

Sometimes, it’s what feels right.

He catches Dani’s silhouette through the glass and stops trying to hold the cacophony of futures in his hands. The world blurs, refocuses on a singular truth: he’ll go mad if he keeps chasing what’s ahead instead of what’s right in front of him.

“You’ve been helping Dr. Whitly by killing people who hurt Ainsley in the past, who kept her from achieving who knows what if they hadn’t gotten in her way. Someone in your past did something similar, and they left you wondering what if every single day of your life.”

Chester’s hand quavers. The pressure of knifepoint to flesh eases.

“But John Watkins didn’t do that. He’s a murderer, but he didn’t take anything away from Ainsley. Dr. Whitly is the one trying to take something from her right now. He’s taking something from you.”

Agitated, Chester snarls, “What the hell do you mean?” and fresh-drawn blood gleams alongside beaded sweat.

Malcolm wets his lips again and scrapes them dry, inching forward another half-step. “If you kill him, and those cops in the hall come in here with guns drawn, you know what’ll happen. You’ll die, and the only person who’ll be able to tell your story is my father.” Another step. “Even if he doesn’t take full credit for what you’ve done, he’s going to make sure the only person who’s remembered is him.”

“Your sister is going to be famous.” Chester’s feverish gaze darts to Ainsley and Watkins. “I did that.”

“That’s the story my father wanted to tell. You can tell a better one, Chester. If she saves the man who once tried to kill her, she’ll be a hero. You’ll be a hero, too, if you let her.” Malcolm’s close enough now he can smell the cameraman’s nervous sweat over the scent of blood. “All you need to do is give me the knife.”

Tempting flickers of what could be vie for Malcolm’s attention. Trusting in himself the way he should’ve trusted in Ainsley, he turns his back on them and offers a hand for the knife.

Anything could happen.

The future is possibility.

The knife clatters to the ground. Malcolm grabs the hostage’s wrist, pulling him out of reach as Chester’s hold loosens. The detectives burst through the door; in seconds, JT holds Chester pinned to the wall while Dani secures the cuffs.

It took long enough to talk Chester down that the EMTs are waiting in the wings. Though maybe, Malcolm thinks as he watches them take over from Ainsley, prying her blood-soaked hands away from the ruin of his jacket, he stalled just long enough for them to get here with only one person in need of their attention. Without having taken that last glimpse into the future, he’ll never know.

And for once, not knowing doesn’t feel so terrible.

As JT and the guard walk Chester out, Malcolm turns to Dani and offers a relieved smile as she lays a hand on his chest, right beneath his shoulder.

“Couldn’t hear a damn thing,” she says, “but whatever you said, it did the trick. You saved that man’s life,” and between the words he hears, maybe more.

With the spike in his adrenaline waning and the pressure at the base of his skull beginning to ache, all he wants is to sink into her warmth, press his thanks into her skin. For now, holding onto the promise of it in her eyes will have to do.

Ainsley is left standing alone in the middle of abandoned equipment, his bloodied jacket hanging limp from her hands. There’s still too much blood for his liking, but losing a jacket to service as a makeshift bandage is a vast improvement over what else could’ve been lost.

When Malcolm goes to her, the fire that sparks to life in her eyes is so welcome he almost hugs her. Would’ve, except she tosses the jacket to him and crosses her arms. “You were right, okay?” Her jaw juts forward. “You were right, I was hiding something from you.”

“You made a deal with Dad to keep me out of prison,” Malcolm guesses, “and in exchange for whatever strings he pulled, he asked you to interview John Watkins. He would’ve had you watch him die.”

She rolls her eyes and almost hides her unease at the thought. “Congratulations, you’re a genius. I really don’t want to hear it right now.”

Her hurt is tangible and momentarily too much for him to bear. “I’m sorry. Just… please,” he asks, staying her sharp retort, “please let me finish. I’m sorry for leaving you.”

Whatever Ainsley had expected from him, it wasn’t an apology. Her eyes flash wide before narrowing with a distinctly journalistic suspicion. He sighs.

“If I had spent more time with you when you needed me, I might’ve been able to prevent a lot of this. I absolutely would’ve known you well enough to realize Dad wouldn’t get to you so easily.”

Some stiffness leaves her frame, but it does little to warm her tone. “What do you want, Malcolm?”

A peculiar little itch niggles at the back of Malcolm’s mind. If he pushed at it, a crisscrossing weave of choices and their consequences would lay themselves out like a police lineup, baring themselves to his scrutiny while remaining entirely inscrutable. He could pick a path through this moment, and the next, and the next, and for a time, it would feel safe to be certain, rarely doubting. In a second, he could choose the trajectory of the rest of his life without the need to actually live it.

And what could he do with a life not worth the time it takes to live it? Nothing he would want to.

“I thought maybe I could give being an older brother a try. Maybe a little less profiling, not so much... you know,” he says, and takes a chance on a smirk, rolling his eyes and waving vaguely at his face, “and a few more movie nights.”

Minutes or hours or days could pass, and Malcolm would stand here and wait. A thousand microexpressions show on Ainsley’s face, with frustration making a stand out appearance, usually followed by a helpless kind of amusement. Finally, she uncrosses her arms, steps into his space.

“I’m still pissed at you,” she says, jabbing a pointy finger into his sternum, “and I have every right to be.”

Malcolm rubs at his chest and opens his mouth, closes it again. He scrambles for something to say that won’t end with a hole drilled through his breastbone and straight into his spine.

She sighs. “But you don’t have to be so dramatic all the time. You never stopped being my brother, Malcolm. You just need to pull your head out of your ass every once in a while. Not everything has to be about Dad.”

“I’ll… try to remember that.” Malcolm eyes the cameraman who, having declined treatment, is standing expectantly off to the side fiddling with their equipment. “You’re not still going to film this, are you?”

“Are you kidding me?” Ainsley’s small hand smacks into his shoulder with a surprising amount of force. “If I get a statement now, it could go national.”

Swallowing both his objections and the need to rub at his shoulder, he offers a tentative smile. “Go get ‘em, Ains.”

She steps around him, bumping him with her hip and offering a smile in return. As the door swings shut behind her, she calls, “Thanks, bro.”

When Dani’s warmth returns, he gratefully leans into her strength. “What’s going to happen to her?”

“Nothing, probably. Whoever set up the transfer wasn’t an idiot. Donating money to a historic building for renovation and preservation isn’t against the law, and as far as bribes for fast tracking construction permits go, I can tell you a new skylight is so far down the list of possible investigations that it might as well not be on there at all.” Dani drops her chin and looks at him from the corners of her eyes. “As for the rest of the money and what Dr. Whitly did with it, I don’t know that Major Crimes has much cause to dig further.”

The slight emphasis put on the division sends his eyebrow winging upward. “But,” he ventures, “if a couple of curious individuals were interested in pursuing the matter on the side, in their free time… over dinner?”

Her grin is slow to spread and infectious. “Then I’d say their chances are pretty good.”


	19. Don't Gotta Love You on the Low, Now

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Related track: [Down to Earth by UMI](https://youtu.be/JsQOymdrun0) (YouTube).

Malcolm beats her to the bar by a good twenty minutes, which means by the time she strolls in, he looks like a lone sheep surrounded by a group of very curious wolves.

Placing her order at the bar gives her time to check it out from afar. She can only imagine the grilling he got from Leti, who sits back on the lone divan, her legs crossed at the knee as she sips her drink and watches his attention flit between the rest of the squad. Her judgment clearly already made, all that’s left is for her to declare she loves him, or she hates him.

For the first time, Dani’s actually nervous about which it’ll be.

There are plenty of reasons Leti is her best friend, and right now, not making her sweat it out ranks pretty damn high. A swat at Dani’s ass when she gets close is the answer she needed, and the second her drink is on the table, Leti hauling her unceremoniously down into her lap for a squeeze of approval is the rousing endorsement she wanted.

Hooking an arm around Leti’s neck to cuddle closer, Dani pushes her hair out of her face and smiles softly as she looks around, catches all the subtle signals that say yeah, they’re on board with this one.

Malcolm breaks eye contact just long enough to slide a warm smile her way before refocusing all of his attention to the rambling story Chelsea is trying to tell with Toan’s questionable assistance.

It’s almost impossible to know if he’s having a good time or if he’s being polite to her friends, but as the night goes on and their staked-out corner turns from crowded to packed, the shuffle of refills and bathroom breaks eventually lands them side by side on the divan. Enjoying the freedom to toy with the neatly trimmed hair at his nape as she pillows her cheek on his shoulder, she watches for the moment when the regulars all start to shout at one another more than at him. Mouth to his ear, she asks, “You want to know how it went with your father?”

He twists towards her, the soft prickle of his stubble brushing her cheek. “How did he take the news?”

“Not great.” She doesn’t hide the unflattering satisfaction in her voice.

He skewers her with a sidelong look, then snorts a laugh. “Guess I should be prepared for some phone messages to come my way.”

“Just a few.” She takes her time with the next, savoring it. “Warden even covered up his skylight.”

The news as much as her delivery prompts a softer laugh. “Good.”

With his profile turned to her, she’s struck again by how easily he wears his emotions on his sleeve. She threads her fingers fully with his and squeezes, determined to return the favor as best she can. “You wanna get out of here?”

“Your friends—”

“Can text me.” Taking his other hand, she draws him up and leads the way outside.

Her ears ring momentarily in the relative quiet of the street. When it clears, she turns to walk backward and confesses, “Gil tried to give me the ‘you’d better not hurt him’ talk. It was kinda sweet.”

“Funny,” he says, his smile wry and shy and somehow exactly right, “I was on the receiving end of that particular talk from JT.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Don’t tell him I said his bad cop needs work.”

Laughing, she falls back into step alongside him, their arms intertwined. She can’t see all the futures he can, and she wouldn’t want to. The one laid out in front of them looks just fine from here.

Art by Illest Rin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can enjoy the fic's playlist (compiled by Ponderosa) on [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4zIllXBQWXxRFnzR525UAL?si=V-UbeLFMTZmwLY246Bcn2w) or on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLozus3ETeqeM-GTSbr0P95OwRIkNkAGkr).
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End file.
